The priest, poor man! aged a dozen years by his anxieties since I had seen him last, was dubious of his senses when I entered where he lodged, and he wept like a bairn to see my face again. “Scotland! Scotland! beshrew me, child, and I'd liefer have this than ten good dinners at Verray's!” cried he, and put his arms about my shoulders and buried his face in my waistcoat to hide his uncontrollable tears. He was quartered upon a pilot of the Schelde and Hollands Deep, whose only child he made a shift to tutor in part payment of his costs, and the very moment that we had come in upon him he was full of a matter that had puzzled him for weeks before we came to Helvoetsluys. 'Twas a thing that partly hurt his pride, though that may seem incredible, and partly gave him pleasure, and 'twas merely that when he had at last found his concealment day and night in the pilot's house unendurable, and ventured a stroll or two upon the dunes in broad sunshine, no one paid any attention to him. There were soldiers and sailors that must have some suspicions of his identity, and he had himself read his own story and description in one of the gazettes, yet never a hand was raised to capture him. “_Ma foi!_ Paul,” he cried to me in a perplexity. “I am the most marvellous priest unfrocked, invisible to the world as if I had Mambrino's helmet. Sure it cannot be that I am too stale quarry for their hunting! My _amour propre_ baulks at such conclusion. I that have--heaven help me!--loaded pistols against the Lord's anointed, might as well have gone shooting sparrows for all the infamy it has gained me. But yesterday I passed an officer of the peace that cried '_Bon jour_, father,' in villainous French with a smile so sly I could swear he knew my history from the first breeching. I avow that my hair stirred under my hat when he said it.” MacKellar stood by contemptuous of the priest's raptures over his restored secretary. “Goodness be about us!” he said, “what a pity the brock should be hiding when there's nobody hunting him! The first squirt of the haggis is always the hottest, as the other man said. If they were keen on your track at the start of it--and it's myself has the doubt of that same--you may warrant they are slack on it now. It's Buhot himself would be greatly put about if you went to the jail and put out your hands for the manacles.” Father Hamilton looked bewildered. “Expiscate, good Monsieur MacKellar,” said he. “Kilbride just means,” said I, “that you are in the same case as myself, and that orders have gone out that no one is to trouble you.”