There was one among them whom Leam longed yet dreaded to meet.  This was Alick Corfield.  She wondered what he knew, or rather what he suspected, and she was anxious to have her ordeal over.  But, though Mrs. Corfield came, and was just the same as ever, bustling, inquisitive, dogmatic, before ten minutes were over having put the girl through her scholastic facings and got from her the whole of her curriculum, yet Alick did not appear.  He waited until after Sunday, when he should see her first in church, and so nerve himself as it were behind the barrier of his sacred office; but after Sunday had passed and he had seen her in her old place, he called, and found her alone.

When they met, and she looked into his face and laid her hand in his, she knew all.  He shared her secret, and knew what she had done.  It was not that he was either distant or familiar, cold or disrespectful, or anything but glad and reverent; nevertheless, he knew.  He was no longer the boy adorer, her slave, her dog:  he was her friend, and he wished to make her feel that she was safe with him—­known, in his power, but safe.

“You are changed,” he said awkwardly.

He thought of her as Leam, heard her always called Leam, but he dared not use the familiar name, and yet she was not “Miss Dundas” to him.

“It is four years since you saw me,” she said with a grave smile.  “It was time to change.”

“But you are your old self too,” he returned eagerly.  He would have no disloyalty done to the queen of his boyish dreams:  what worm soever was at its root, his royal pomegranate flower should be always set fair in the sun where he might be.

“You seem much changed too,” she said after a short pause—­“graver and older.  Is that because you are a clergyman?”

Alick turned his eyes away from the girl’s face, and looked mournfully out onto the autumn woods.  “Partly,” he said.

“And the other part?” asked Leam, pressing to know the worst.

“And the other part?” He looked at her, and his wan face grew paler.  “Well, never mind the other part.  There are things which sometimes come into a man’s life and wither it for ever, as a fire passing over a green tree, but we do not speak of them.”

“To no one?”

“To no one.”

Leam sighed.  No proclamation could have made the thing clearer between them.  Henceforth she was in Alick’s power:  let him be faithful, chivalrous, loyal, devoted, what you will, she was no longer her own unshared property.  He knew what she was, and in so far was her master.

Poor Alick!  This was not the light in which he held his fatal secret.  True, he knew what she had done, and that his young queen, his ideal, was a murderess, who, if the truth were made public, would be degraded below the level of the poorest wretch that had kept an honest name; but he felt himself more accursed than she, in that he had been the means whereby she had gotten both her knowledge and the power