"I'll go--and privately," I answered him. "Make yourself easy."

"And not a word to your mother?" he asked anxiously.

"Just so," I replied. "Leave it to me."

He looked vastly relieved at that, and after assuring him that I had the
message by heart I left his chamber and went downstairs. After all, it
was no great task that he had put on me. I had often stayed until very
late at the office, where I had the privilege of reading law-books at
nights, and it was an easy business to mention to my mother that I
wouldn't be in that night so very early. That part of my contract with
the sick man upstairs I could keep well enough, in letter and spirit--all
the same, I was not going out along Tweed-side at that hour of the night
without some safeguard, and though I would tell no one of what my
business for Mr. Gilverthwaite precisely amounted to, I would tell one
person where it would take me, in case anything untoward happened and I
had to be looked for. That person was the proper one for a lad to go to
under the circumstances--my sweetheart, Maisie Dunlop.

And here I'll take you into confidence and say that at that time Maisie
and I had been sweethearting a good two years, and were as certain of
each other as if the two had been twelve. I doubt if there was such
another old-fashioned couple as we were anywhere else in the British
Islands, for already we were as much bound up in each other as if we had
been married half a lifetime, and there was not an affair of mine that I
did not tell her of, nor had she a secret that she did not share with me.
But then, to be sure, we had been neighbours all our lives, for her
father, Andrew Dunlop, kept a grocer's shop not fifty yards from our