“Robbie! Robbie! my only son--my only child! I’ll be dead and gone before ever you could come back.” “You’ll live the longest of the two of us, mother.” “God forbid!” she said; “God forbid! But why will ye go out into the jaws of death and the mouth of hell? If the pursuers of blood are after him, they are not after you. Oh, Robbie, stay with your mother. Dinna forsake me for a strange man.” “Mother,” he said, with a hoarse voice, “when your friend is in deadly danger, is that the time, think you, to forsake him?” And Mrs Ogilvy was silent. She looked at him with a gasp in her throat. All her old teachings, the tenets of her life, came back upon her and choked her. When your friend is in deadly danger! Was it not she who had taught her son that of all the moments of life that was the last to choose to abandon a friend. She could make him no answer; she only stared at him with troubled failing eyes. “But once he is in safety,” Robbie said, with a stammer of hesitation and confusion, “once I can feel sure that---- Mother, I promise you, if I can help it, I will not go--where he is going. I--promise you.” He cast a look behind him. There was no one there, but Lew’s door was open, and it was possible he might hear. Robbie bent forward hastily to his mother’s ear. “I cannot stand against him,” he said; “I cannot: I told you--he is my master,--didn’t I tell you? But I will come back--I will come back--as soon as I am free.” He trembled, too, throughout his big bulk, with agitation and excitement--more than she ever did in her weakness. If this was so, was it not now her business to be strong to support her boy? She went on to her room to put on her other cap, to prepare for the evening, and the last meal they were to eat together. The habits of life are so strong; her heart was breaking, and yet she knew that it was time to put on her evening cap. She went into her room, too, with the feeling that there no new agitation could come near her, that she might kneel down a moment by her bedside, and get a little calm and strength. But not to-night. To her astonishment and horror, the tall figure of Lew raised itself from the old-fashioned escritoire in which she kept her papers and did her writing. He turned round, and faced her with a laugh. “Oh, it is you!” he said. “I thought it was your good son Bob. You surprised us when we were making a little examination by ourselves. It is always better to examine for yourself, don’t you know----” “To examine--what?” “Where the money is, mother,” he said, with another laugh. She had herself closed the door before she had seen him. She was at his mercy. “You think, then,” she said, “that I’ve told you a lie--about money?” “Everybody tells lies about money, mother. I never knew one yet who did not declare he had none--until it was taken out of his pockets, or out of his boxes, or out of a nice little piece of furniture like this, which an old lady can keep in her bedroom--locked.”