“Nay, he said nothing about money. It was some love trouble, I take it. He thought he could better forget the girl if he ran away from his country and his work. He has found out his mistake by this time, no doubt.”
“You knew he was going to leave ‘The Line’ then?”
“Yes, we let him go; and I heard say that he had shipped on an American line, sailing to Cuba, or New Orleans, or somewhere near the equator.”
“Well, I shall try and find him.”
“I wouldn’t, if I was you. He is sure to come back to his home again. He showed me a lock of the lassie’s hair. Man! a single strand of it would pull him back to Scotland sooner or later.”
“But I have wronged him sorely. I did not mean to wrong him, but that does not alter the case.”
“Not a bit. Love sickness is one thing; a wrong against a man’s good name or good fortune, is a different matter. I would find him and right him.”
“That is what I want to do.”
And so when the Circassia sailed out of Greenock for New York, Andrew Binnie sailed in her. “It is not a very convenient journey,” he said rather sadly, as he left Scotland behind him, “but wrong has been done, and wrong has no warrant, and I’ll never have a good day till I put the wrong right; so the sooner the better, for, as Mother says, ‘that which a fool does at the end a wise man does at the beginning.’”