“Eh, bless me, mem, but I ken that weel!” cried Gilchrist; “and if I had thought you were taking it on that high line, never word would have come out of my mouth.” “I am taking it on no high line--but I see what is for it as well as what is against it. I have kept my head clear,” said Miss Bethune. “On other occasions, I grant you, I may have let myself go: but in all this I have been like a judge, and refused to listen to the voice in my own heart. But it was there all the time, though I crushed it down. How can the like of you understand? You’ve never felt a baby’s cry go into the very marrow of your bones. I’ve set the evidence all out, and pled the cause before my own judgment, never listening one word to the voice in my heart.” Miss Bethune spoke with greater and greater vehemence, but here paused to calm herself. “The boy that was carried off would have been twenty-five on the eighteenth of next month (as well you know), and this boy is just on five and twenty, he told me with his own lips; and his father told him with his dying breath that he had a mother living. He had the grace to do that! Maybe,” said Miss Bethune, dropping her voice, which had again risen in excitement, “he was a true penitent when it came to that. I wish no other thing. Much harm and misery, God forgive him, has he wrought; but I wish no other thing. It would have done my heart good to think that his was touched and softened at the last, to his Maker at least, if no more.” “Oh, mem, the one would go with the other, if what you think is true.” “No,” said Miss Bethune, shutting her lips tight, “no, there’s no necessity. If it had been so what would have hindered him to give the boy chapter and verse? Her name is So-and-so, you will hear of her at such a place. But never that--never that, though it would have been so easy! Only that he had a mother living, a mother that the guardian man and the lad himself divined must have been a ---- Do you not call that evidence?” cried Miss Bethune, with a harsh triumph. “Do you not divine our man in that? Oh, but I see him as clear as if he had signed his name.” “Dear mem,” cried Gilchrist, with a “tchick, tchick,” of troubled sympathy and spectatorship, “you canna wish he had been a true penitent and yet think of him like that.” “And who are you to lay down the law and say what I can do?” cried the lady. She added, with a wave of her hand and her head: “We’ll not argue that question: but if there ever was an action more like the man!--just to give the hint and clear his conscience, but leave the woman’s name to be torn to pieces by any dozen in the place! If that is not evidence, I don’t know what evidence is.”