"And do you say that is how I have been able to buy my house at Greenock," said Colin Laing, angrily, "with a garden, and a boathouse, too?"
"I do not know about that," said Hamish; and then he called out some order to one of the men. Macleod was at this moment down in the saloon, seated at the table, with a letter enclosed and addressed lying before him. But surely this was not the same man who had been in these still waters of the Thames in the by-gone days—with gay companions around him, and the band playing "A Highland Lad my Love was born," and a beautiful-eyed girl, whom he called Rose-leaf, talking to him in the quiet of the summer noon. This man had a look in his eyes like that of an animal that has been hunted to death, and is fain to lie down and give itself up to its pursuers in the despair of utter fatigue. He was looking at this letter. The composition of it had cost him only a whole night's agony. And when he sat down and wrote it in the blue-gray dawn, what had he not cast away?
"Oh no," he was saying now to his own conscience, "she will not call it deceiving! She will laugh when it is all over—she will call it a stratagem—she will say that a drowning man will catch at anything. And this is the last effort—but it is only a stratagem: she herself will absolve me, when she laughs and says, 'Oh, how could you have treated the poor theatres so?'"
A loud rattling overhead startled him.
"We must be at Erith," he said to himself; and then, after a pause of a second, he took the letter in his hand. He passed up the companion-way. Perhaps it was the sudden glare of the light around that falsely gave to his eyes the appearance of a man who had been drinking hard; but his voice was clear and precise as he said to Hamish,—
"Now, Hamish, you understand everything I have told you?"
"Oh yes, Sir Keith."
"And you will put away that nonsense from your head; and when you see the English lady that you remember, you will be very respectful to her, for she is a very great friend of mine; and if she is not at the theatre, you will go on to the other address, and Colin Laing will go with you in the cab. And if she comes back in the cab, you and Colin will go outside beside the driver, do you understand? And when you go ashore, you will take John Cameron with you, and you will ask the pier-master about the moorings."
"Oh yes, Sir Keith; have you not told me before?" Hamish said, almost reproachfully.
"You are sure you got everything on board last night?"