“We shall be glad to help you if we can,” said the minister.
Then Allison told her story briefly, so briefly that it is doubtful whether her listeners would have understood it, if they had heard it then for the first time. They had not heard it all, only bits here and there of it, but enough to enable them to understand something of the morbid fear and the sense of utter desolation from which she had suffered, when she first came among them. Her voice grew firm as she went on, and she spoke clearly and strongly, so that many words were not needed. She hesitated a little, when she came to the time when she had asked John Beaton to befriend her brother, but she went on gravely:
“He did not see my brother. He had gone. I had been months away with the child, before I heard that Willie was in America safe and well. It was a friend who wrote to me—Mr Hadden, our minister’s son. Willie is doing well, and some time I am to go out to him—if I can.”
She paused, withdrew her hand from Mrs Hume’s clasp, and rose, saying:
“Now, I must tell you. All this time I have been afraid that—the man who married me would find me and take me to his house in spite of me. But it is I who have found him. It was Mr Crombie who told me about him. He said he had seen him—on his dying bed, and in God’s name he bade me go to him, and tell him that I forgave him for the ill he did me. He said it was not between me and the man who had sinned against me, but it was between me and the Lord himself, and that I must forgive if I would be forgiven. And if you shall say the same—”
Allison sat down and bent her head upon her hands. Mrs Hume laid her hand upon the bowed head, but she did not speak. Mr Hume said:
“I do not see how Crombie has had to do with this matter.”
Allison looked up.
“I should have told you that it was in our parish that Mr Crombie buried his wife. He saw the names of my father and mother on their headstone, and some one there—meaning me no ill—told him about me. And when he came home again, he thought it his duty to point out to me that I might be in the wrong. But I think it must have gone out of his mind, for he never spoke to me again till to-night.”
“And to-night he spoke?”