“So far as I understood,” said Elsie, “he thought you wanted to make my father betray some poor bodies that trusted in him.” Elsie, too, thought it was wiser to forestall any other statement. But she put forth this bold statement with a high colour and a quaking heart. “Betray!” cried Frank, growing red, too, “oh, I assure you, I had no such thought.” “You wanted my father to tell upon the poor folk that had borrowed money, and were not able to pay.” Elsie averted her head for the reason that, sorely troubled by her own guesses and doubts, she could not look Frank in the face: but he interpreted this action in quite another way. He took it for a gesture of disdain, and it roused a spirit even in the bosom of Elsie’s slave. “Justice is justice,” he said, “Miss Elsie, whether one is poor or rich. To hunt the poor is what I would never do; but if they are right who told me, there are others passing themselves off under the shield of the poor, that are quite well able to pay their debts--more able than we are to do without the money: and that is just what I want to ask Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know.” It seemed to Elsie that the sands, and the rocks, and the cliffs beyond were all turning round and round, and that the solid earth sank under her feet. “Mr. Buchanan, who is sure to know,” she said to herself under her breath. Oh yes, he was sure to know. He would look into the face of this careless boy, who understood nothing about it, and he would say--what would he say? It made Elsie sick and faint to think of her father--her father, the minister, the example to all men--brought face to face with this temptation, against which she had heard him struggling, which she had heard him adopting, without knowing what it meant, six years ago. No, he had not been struggling against it. He had been struggling with it, trying to convince himself that it was just and right. This came upon her like a flash of lightning, as she took a few devious steps forward. Then Frank’s outcry, “You are ill, Miss Elsie!” brought her back to herself. “No, I am not ill,” she said, standing still by the rocks, and taking hold of a glistening pinnacle covered with seaweed, to support herself for a moment, till everything settled down. “I am not ill: I am just thinking,” she kept her head turned away, and looked out upon the level of the sea, very blue and rippled over with wavelets in its softest summer guise, with a faint rim of white showing in the distance against the red sand and faint green banks of the Forfar coast. Of all things in this world to make the heart sick, there is nothing like facing a moral crisis, which some one you love is about to go through, without any feeling of certainty that he will meet it in the one only right way. “Oh, if it was only me!” Elsie sighed, from the bottom of her heart.