He raised his head and looked at her with an eager cry. "I want--not forgiveness. I want life," he cried, "life, new life. I want to be born again. Is not that in the Bible? To be born again, to begin again from the beginning, everything new. Help me, Oona! I am not thinking of the past. It is _now_ I am thinking of. I am not thinking of forgiveness--punishment if you please, anything!--but a new life. He knew man who said that," Walter cried, raising his head. "What use is it to me to forgive me? I want to be born again." When he thus delivered himself of his exceeding bitter cry, this woman too, like his mother, answered him with a shining face, with eyes swimming in tears, and brilliant with celestial certainty. She put out her hands to him without a moment's hesitation, and grasped his and smiled. "Oh, that is all provided for!" she said. "Yes, He knew! It is all ready for you--waiting--waiting. Don't you know our Lord stands at the door and knocks, till you are ready to let Him in? And now you are ready. There is nothing more." He received the soft hands within his with feelings indescribable, at such a height of emotion that all the lesser shades and degrees were lost. He twined her fingers among his own, clasping them with an entire appropriation. "Oona," he said, "the house is yours, and all in it. Open the door to your Lord, whom I am not worthy to come near--and to everything that is good. It is yours to do it. Open the door!" They had forgotten Hamish who sat behind, pulling his long, even strokes, with his anxious shaggy countenance fixed like that of a faithful dog upon his mistress, whom he had to guard. He saw the two heads draw very close together, and the murmur of the voices. "What will she be saying to him? She will be winning him out of yon transport. She will be puttin' peace in his hairt. She has a voice that would wile the bird from the tree," said Hamish to himself. "But oh hon!--my bonnie Miss Oona," Hamish cried aloud. This disturbed them and made them conscious of the spectator, who was there with them, separate from all the world. Oona, with a woman's readiness to throw her veil over and hide from the eye of day all that is too sacred for the vulgar gaze, raised her face, still quivering with tender and holy passion. "Why do you say 'oh hon?' There is nothing to say 'oh hon' for, Hamish. No, no; but the other way." Hamish looked across the young lord, whose head was bowed down still over Oona's hands, which he held. The boatman gave him a glance in which there was doubt and trouble, and then raised his shaggy eyebrows, and addressed a look of entreaty and warning to the fair inspired face that hovered over Walter like a protecting angel. "Ye will not be doing the like of that," he said, "without thought?"