“What is he meaning now, I wonder?” said Morrison to Mrs. Buchanan, with a half-comic glance aside. “He is just a wee off his head with diseased conscientiousness. I’ve met with the malady before, but it’s rare, I must say, very rare. Well, come, out with it, Buchanan. What is this about fourscore?” “You misunderstand me,” he cried. “I must demand seriousness and your attention.” “Bless us, man, we’re not at the kirk,” Morrison said. The minister was very impatient. He dealt the table a weak blow, as he sometimes did to the cushion of his pulpit. “Perhaps I did it on purpose,” he said, “perhaps it was half-unconscious, I cannot tell; but I gave you to believe that my debt was smaller than it really was. Morrison, I owed Mr. Anderson three hundred pounds.” The tone of solemnity with which he spoke could scarcely have been more impressive had he been reasoning, like St. Paul, of mercy, temperance, and judgment to come. And he felt as if he were doing so: it was the most solemn of truths he was telling against himself; the statement as of a dying man. His wife felt it so, too, in a sympathy that disturbed her reason, standing with her hand upon the back of his chair. Morrison stood for a moment, overcome by the intensity of the atmosphere, opening his mouth in an amazed gasp. “Three hundred pounds!” the minister repeated, deliberately, with a weight of meaning calculated to strike awe into every heart. But the impression made upon his audience unfortunately did not last. The writer stared and gasped, and then he burst into a loud guffaw. It was irresistible. The intense gravity of the speaker, the exaltation of his tone, the sympathy of his wife’s restrained excitement, and then the words that came out of it all, so commonplace, so little conformable to that intense and tragic sentiment--overwhelmed the man of common sense. Morrison laughed till the tremulous gravity of the two discomposed him, and made him ashamed of himself, though their look of strained and painful seriousness almost brought back the fit when it was over. He stopped all of a sudden, silenced by this, and holding his hand to his side. “I beg your pardon, Mrs. Buchanan. It was just beyond me. Lord’s sake, man, dinna look so awesome. I was prepared to hear it was thirty thousand at the least.” “Thirty thousand,” said the minister, “to some people is probably less than three hundred to me: but we cannot expect you to feel with us in respect to that. Morrison, you must help us somehow to pay this money, for we cannot raise it in a moment; but with time every penny shall be paid.” “To whom?” said Morrison, quietly. “To whom? Are not you the man of business? To the estate, of course--to the heir.”