A few days only!—God grant it! But what—what if he should find her dead?
Macfarlane noticed the sadness of his expression, but prudently forbore to make any remark upon it. He contented himself with saying—
"Weel, ye've got a wife worth having—as I dare say ye know. I shall be glad to pay my respects to her as soon as she returns. I've got your address, Errington—will ye take mine?"
And he handed him a small card on which was written in pencil the number of a house in one of the lowest streets in the East-end of London. Philip glanced at it with some surprise.
"Is this where you live?" he asked with emphatic amazement.
"Yes. It's just the cleanest tenement I could find in that neighborhood. And the woman that keeps it is fairly respectable."
"But with your money," remonstrated Lorimer, who also looked at the card, "I rather wonder at your choice of abode. Why, my dear fellow, do you know what sort of a place it is?"
A steadfast, earnest, thinking look came into Macfarlane's deep-set, grey eyes.
"Yes, I do know, pairfectly," he said in answer to the question. "It's a place where there's misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts,—and there I am in the very midst of it—just where I want to be. Ye see, I was meant to be a meenister—one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit about predestination and original sin, and so forth a—sort, of palaver that does no good to ony resonable creature—an' if I had followed out this profession, I make nae doot that, with my aunt's seventy thousand, I should be a vera comfortable, respectable, selfish type of a man, who was decently embarked in an apparently important but really useless career—"
"Useless?" interrupted Lorimer archly. "I say, Mac, take care! A minister of the Lord, useless!"