As Fergus looked down his breast began to heave and the tears came into his eyes.
"The bonnie, bonnie lad," he said; "he wadna run awa'."
"Come, now," said Fergus tenderly, "we'll get down ta the brook."
With one arm around him, Fergus helped him through the woods, and knelt beside him while he dashed the cold water over his face and head.
"I hit ye hard," said Fergus, "and it's likely yer eye'll be blackened."
Nort sat down with his back to a tree trunk. He was sick and dizzy. It seemed to him that the thing he wanted most in all the world was to be left alone.
"I'm going away, Fergus. Leave me here. I shall not go back to Hempfield."
Fergus offered no excuses, suggested no change in plan. It was working out exactly as he intended: he was sorry for Nort, but this was his duty. He made Nort as comfortable as he could, and then set off toward town. As he proceeded, he stepped faster and faster. He began to feel a curious exaltation of spirit. It was the greatest moment of his whole life. If you had seen him at that moment, with his head lifted high, you would scarcely have known him. As the town came into view, with the eastern sun upon it, Fergus burst out in a voice as wild and harsh as a bagpipe:
"Wha will be a traitor knave? Wha will fill a coward's grave? Wha sae base as be a slave? Let him turn and flee!"
For that which followed I make no excuse, nor think I need to, but I must tell it, for it is a part of the history of Hempfield and of the life of Fergus MacGregor. Ours is a temperance town, and Fergus MacGregor a temperate man; but that morning Fergus was seen going over the hill beyond the town, unsteady in the legs, and still singing. He did not appear at the office of the _Star_ all that day.
As for Nort, he lay for a long time there at the foot of the beech tree, miserably sick in body and soul--dozing off from time to time, and trying to think, dumbly, what was left to him in the world. He was as deep in the depths that morning as he had been high in the heavens the evening before.
I can imagine just how Nort looked, sitting in the bare room of the Bedlow Hotel of Hewlett, biting the end of his pen and struggling furiously with his letter to Anthy. In one moment he would let himself go the limit: "My dearest Anthy, I shall never see you again, and I can therefore tell you with the more freedom of my undying love----" and at the next moment he would hold himself to the strictest restraint: "My dear Miss Doane" or "Dear Miss Doane." Half the letters he wrote were too long, or too wild, or too passionate, and the other half were too short or too cold. Before he got through, the table and floor all about him were drifted white with torn scraps of his correspondence.