Out in the Forty-Five / Duncan Keith's Vow - Emily Sarah Holt

“Ay, I have been bought twice over,” was the trembling answer. “God help me to live worthy of the cost!”

We all keep the name of Duncan Keith in our inmost hearts—unspoken, but very dear. But I think it is dearest of all in a little house in the outskirts of Amsterdam, where, now that my Uncle Drummond has been called to his reward, our Flora keeps home bright for a Protestant pastor who works all the day through in the prisons of Amsterdam, among the lowest of the vile; who knows what exile and imprisonment are; and who, once in every year, as the day of his substitute’s death comes round, pleads with these prisoners from words which are overwhelming to himself,—“Ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price.”

Many of those men and women sink back again into the mire. But now and then the pastor knows that a soul has been granted to his pleadings,—that in one more instance, as in his own case, the price was not paid in vain.

Note 1. The recognised Jacobite way of answering:—“The King over the water.”

The End.