He stopped, and, with a smile, kissed the girl tenderly. "Never fear, darling--_that_ shall be made as the world wants it. I was thinking of the past, not the future. And if ours was a sin, it was one of passion only, and we whispered each other--did we not?--that He who gave the love would forgive its transgression." Then they walked on. In the distance the hill above glowed red through the darkness. Danny's Contrary fire, which had smoldered all day, showed brightly again. "Oh, how glad I am that all is over," repeated the girl, creeping closer beneath Christian's arm. "You said to-night to your father that a secret sin is a corroding thing. How truly I've felt it so when I've thought of my own poor father. You never knew him. He died before you came to us. He was a good, simple man, and loved us, though perhaps he left us poorer than we might have been, and more troubled than we were in the old days at Glen Rushen." "No, I never knew him; but the thought of him has stung me to the quick when I've seen his daughter working for daily bread. It has been then that I've felt myself the meanest of men." "Christian," continued Mona, regardless of the interruption, "have you ever thought that the dead are links that connect us with the living?" "How?" "Well, in this way. From our kin in heaven we can have no secrets; and when the living kin guess our hidden thought, our secret act, perhaps it has been our dead kin who have whispered of it." "That is a strange fancy, Mona, an awful fancy. Few of us would dare to have secrets if we accepted it." They were approaching the cottage, and could hear a merry child's voice singing. "Listen," said Mona, and they stopped. Then the girl's head dropped. Tears were again in her eyes. "She's been sorrow as well as happiness to you, my brave Mona," said Christian. And he put her arms about his neck. The girl lifted her face to his in the darkness. "That's true," she said. "Ah, how often in the early days did I gaze into the face of my fatherless little one, and feel a touch of awe in the presence of the mute soul that lay behind the speechless baby face, and wonder if some power above had told it something that its mother must needs hide from it, and if, when it spoke, it would reproach me with its own shame, or pity me for mine." Christian smoothed her hand tenderly. "If the child suffered," he said, "before her race of life began, let it be mine henceforth to make it up to her with all that love can yet do." "And when I heard its cry," said Mona, "its strange, pitiful cry as it awoke from that mystery, a baby's troubled dream, and looked into its red startled eyes and into its little face, all liquid grief, and said, 'It's only a dream, darling,' the thought has sometimes stolen up to my heart that perhaps some evil spirit had whispered to it the story of its shame--for what else had it to cry about so bitterly?"