But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example to her dependants. She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and stamp it out. But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence, still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had formerly--before the fever--dominated my influence, so now it dominated my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now. He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me. Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust--I was as Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey boy's words at the thought of the Caesar of hell whose tribute was three human souls.