That same evening Effie Carr wrote out the draft for twenty pounds on the Bank of Scotland, gave it to Stormonth, who, from a signature of the father’s, also furnished by her, perpetrated the forgery—­a crime at that time punishable by death.  The draft so signed was returned to Effie.  Next forenoon she went to the bank, as she had often done for her father before; and the document being in her handwriting, as prior ones of the same kind had also been, no scrutinizing eye was turned to the signature.  The money was handed over, but not counted by the recipient, as before had been her careful habit—­a circumstance with its effect to follow in due time.  Meanwhile Stormonth was at a place of appointment out of the reach of the executor of the law, and was soon found out by Effie, who gave him the money with trembling hands.  For this surely a kiss was due.  We do not know; but she returned with the satisfaction, overcoming all the impulses of fear and remorse, that she had saved the object of her first and only love from ruin and flight.

But even then the reaction was on the spring; the rebound was to be fearful and fatal.  The teller at the bank had been struck with Effie’s manner; and the non-counting of the notes had roused a suspicion, which fought its way even against the improbability of a mere girl perpetrating a crime from which females are generally free.  He examined the draft, and soon saw that the signature was a bad imitation.  Thereupon a messenger was despatched to Bristo Street for inquiry.  John Carr, taken by surprise, declared that the draft, though written by his daughter, was forged—­the forgery being in his own mind attributed to George Lindsay, his young salesman.  Enough this for the bank, who had in the first place only to do with the utterer, against whom their evidence as yet only lay.  Within a few hours afterwards Effie Carr was in the Tolbooth, charged with the crime of forging a cheque on her father’s account-current.

The news soon spread over Edinburgh—­at that time only an overgrown village, in so far as regarded local facilities for the spread of wonders.  It had begun there, where the mother was in recurring faints, the father in distraction and not less mystery, George Lindsay in terror and pity.  And here comes in the next strange turn of our story.  Lindsay all of a sudden declared he was the person who imitated the name—­a device of the yearning heart to save the girl of his affection from the gallows, and clutched at by the mother and father as a means of their daughter’s redemption.  One of those thinly-sown beings who are cold-blooded by nature, who take on love slowly but surely, and seem fitted to be martyrs, Lindsay defied all consequences, so that it might be that Effie Carr should escape an ignominious death.  Nor did he take time for further deliberation:  in less than half an hour he was in the procurator-fiscal’s office—­the willing self-criminator; the man who did the deed;