quickly as it was practicable, and get back to his new world, and this time he would feel himself really emancipated. He would think no more of the bonds of the past. She should be free to marry if she liked, and so would he. This old world and he had nothing to do with each other any more. The foolish thing was that he had come at all on this fool’s errand. It was all the old woman’s fault. It had been weak of him to let her into his secret, to keep himself up with news of home, to be moved by her horror at this marriage. Why should not she marry if she wished to do so? She had been a good wife to him, and he had made her a widow. He had known that she was not a woman who could act for herself, that she was one who must have a caretaker, a manager of external matters? Why should he interfere with her? It was all that confounded old woman’s scruples. But Dalyell decided that he would interfere no more, that he would go back whence he came and marry too, and thus justify his wife. The man’s heart was very heavy in his breast when he made this resolution; but yet he had a great courage, and was determined to stand up against fate and get a new life for himself, being thus horribly, hopelessly cut off from the old. The boy would not carry out his threat if he disappeared thus, and was heard of no more. And all would be well with them, all would go right, as he had meant it should when he gave up his life. By this time the sun had risen, the birds had begun to twitter and hold their morning conversations about all the business of life before it was time to tune up for the concert of the day. Where was he going? He had left such things as he had brought with him at a little lonely wayside public-house near the sea before he went to Yalton, but it was still too early to get admittance there. He found himself on the shore before he knew. Yalton was not above a few miles from the sea, or rather from the Firth in its upper part, not far from the spot where that monstrous prodigy of science, about which so many trumpets have been blown, the Forth Bridge, now strides hideous across the lovely inlet--those golden gates through which the westering sun was wont to stream unbroken from the upper reaches of the great estuary upon the stronger tides below. Dalyell came out upon it suddenly, forgetting in the intense preoccupation of his thoughts where he was. The sun had risen beyond the distant Grampians, touching the Fife villages all along the coast with gold. The air was damp, yet sweet with the saltness of the sea in it, and the breath of distance and the sensation of the vast unknown to which this great, splendid ocean pathway was one of the ways. When Dalyell came out thus upon the shore he was the one speck of animated being in the whole still world. He sat down to rest for a little upon a rock. At three o’clock in the morning there is nothing stirring, not even the cattle, though they were waking and thinking of an early breakfast in the fields.