There was no moon, and the night grew speedily dark; and the road was no smooth, level highway, but a road up hill and down dale, as was natural to the country. Stapylton was so absorbed with its difficulties that he took no notice of the little traveller whose presence could not long be concealed.

‘What is it?’ he said, when little Margaret with a struggle made herself visible from under the cloak.

‘It is only the child,’ Isabel answered in the easiest tone she could attain to, though her very lips were trembling with excitement, and resolution, and alarm. What he said was lost in the night breeze which swept past them as they flew on against it. She thought he too had taken little Margaret’s presence for granted, and her heart seemed to go back with a leap to its natural place in her breast. But the fact was that Stapylton’s mind was at the moment too much occupied to have time to think of the child. When she looked up at him again, she saw that his brow was contracted, his lips firmly set together, a look of oppression and almost terror in his face.

‘This confounded country of yours!’ he said, ‘it is bad enough in daylight, but it’s horrible in the dark. Why did you keep me waiting so long at that infernal cottage-door?’ But he did not seem to notice the answer Isabel made in her dismay. And they swept along through the dark with nothing visible but the pale stars in the sky, and the great shadows of the hills, and glimmer of the larger loch on the other side of the braes to which they were descending; and nothing audible but the sharp din of the horse’s hoofs on the road, and Baby Margaret’s little murmurs as she nestled to her mother’s side. The curious oppression in Stapylton’s face made Isabel, too, hold her breath, though otherwise she would have felt no alarm upon the well-known way. But past agitation had unstrung her, and the thought of the struggle to come. ‘Would you give up your little bairn?’ Ailie’s words were still ringing in her ears, and she kept repeating to herself over and over, ‘Never, oh, never, if I should die!’ While this was going through her mind, Isabel, seated by her husband’s side, trembled with the question, What would he think if he knew her thoughts? What might he be thinking even now, so close to her that she could not move without touching him, so far off that her profoundest skill could not fathom what was in his mind?

It was thus that they reached the first place which in their new-married life they could call home. With a relief which an hour before she could not have believed possible, Isabel placed her baby in the hands of Nelly Spence, who was waiting for them at the door.

‘You’ll take great care of her,’ she said, whispering, as she put the child into her arms.

‘Eh, aye, I’ll take awfu’ care of her,’ was the answer.

And the young mother was glad to be thus relieved, to go to her husband, and do her best to conciliate and please him. The fire was burning brightly in the little bare dining-room, and the table spread; and Horace, still with cloudy looks, sat in a great armchair thrust back into the shadow. It was not home, but yet it was more like home than the honeymoon lodgings. It was, at least, their own house. She had come to him giving up her baby, feeling that such a sacrifice was his due; and, perhaps, she expected that some special word or look of tenderness should reward her. But it was soon evident that his mood was very far from lover-like. He burst out when she came up to the fire and stood with her face turned towards him in the full glow of the firelight. Her agitation had roused all the dormant expression in Isabel’s face. Her eyes looked larger, and were full of light and shadow. A tremulous colour went and came on her cheek. Her mouth was all trembling and eloquent with suppressed feeling, and the glimmering of the firelight gave a certain increase of effect to the whole. He did not even look at her at first, but suddenly burst out:—

‘I hate this country of yours! I always did hate it! I don’t know what made me such an ass as to consent to stay. By Jove! I wonder if any woman was ever worth——’

‘What, Horace?’ she said, trying to laugh.

‘The things we do for them,’ he said. ‘You are a kind of demons with your pretty faces. You tempt us to do a thousand things that if we had our wits about us——’

‘Horace, we have surely something more than pretty faces? Is that all you care for?’ said Isabel.

‘Well, never mind,’ he said, coarsely; ‘if you were plain, you would not ask such a question; but if you had been plain, Isabel, you should never have been my wife.’

He expected her to be pleased with the rough compliment: and, pleased himself, roused up a little out of the shadow, and suffered his face to relax and looked at her as at a picture. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you should never have been my wife. I never thought, even when I admired you most in the old times, that you would have turned out so handsome, Isabel; and when I look at you I don’t mind——’

‘What is it you don’t mind?’

‘All you have cost me,’ he said, falling back into the shadow. ‘By Heaven that night at the opera, when I saw you dazzling—you whom I had been persuading myself to believe was only a pretty country girl. And there you were like a queen of beauty. I shall never forget how I felt that night.’

‘Oh, don’t speak of it!’ she cried. ‘I cannot bear it; don’t remind me of that.’

‘If I could bear it, you may,’ he said, with a certain tone of contempt; ‘but I don’t mind, you are worth it all, my dear; and now let us have some dinner. I have got you in spite of everything, and at least we may be jolly to-night.’

So they sat down to their dinner, which Stapylton himself had taken the trouble to order; and not a word was said about the child. He had accepted it as a natural part of their household, she thought; and Isabel’s heart grew a little lighter with every word he spoke. He had forgotten, no doubt, all that had been said in a different mood; and she began to flatter herself it had been but a passing moment of ill-temper; and that now the child was under his roof, there would be no further comment upon it. A feverish gaiety took possession of her as she caught at this thought. She made a conscious effort to amuse him, stirring up all her dormant powers. She told him of her meeting with Ailie, and did not wince at his rude comments upon the woman he had no understanding of. She was so anxious to please him that she could have borne anything he chose to say. She was lowering to his level, though she did not know it; a certain pleasure in the fact of being able to make him laugh, and turn his thoughts from more serious matters, took possession of her. Oh, if she could only have gone on telling him stories like Scherazade, and occupying him with any romance or trifle till they had embarked on their voyage, and little Margaret under her shawl had been conveyed into the ship unnoticed! It was the first piece of practical falsehood she had ever attempted, and it had been successful beyond her hopes; and in the haste and agitation of the moment it seemed to her that this was the soundest policy, and that there was no other course before her to pursue.

‘That woman was always mad,’ said Stapylton, ‘I could see it from the first; but, by Jove! she must be cunning, too. To get that mad fellow to marry her and make a lady of her, as they say, was the cleverest thing I know. What a fool he must have been, to be sure!’

‘Oh, Horace! you don’t understand Ailie,’ said Isabel.

‘I understand her a great deal better than you do, my dear; though I believe in your heart, if you were to tell the truth, you saw what she was at all along. Depend upon it, there is always some meaning in those got-up things. When I remember how you were all taken in, and expected your sister to get better too—when anybody with half an eye could see she was going as fast as she could go.’

‘Oh, Horace! don’t speak of that,’ cried Isabel. ‘They say there is something in the papers about Mr. John—something that has happened in France. There is the newspaper lying with your letters, will you open it and see?’

‘Time enough for that,’ he said, drawing his chair to the fire. ‘By Jove! he must have been a fool—a bigger fool than even I am, to come down here and bury myself in this hole, all for the sake of you! You ought to be a good wife to me, Isabel, instead of setting up your silly little notions. You never were as happy in all your life before, I know. You never had anyone to pet you before, and make a little idol of you. And yet you go and vex me and spoil all our plans for some foolish notion about a baby, that cares as much for the first country lass that makes a fuss over it as it does for you. Yes, it is a true bill, my darling. You know what a naughty little rebel you are. Now acknowledge that in all your life you never were so happy before?’

It would be safe to say that at this moment, with her husband’s arm round her, and his eyes glowing upon her with admiration and fondness, Isabel had scarcely ever been more unhappy, more torn by painful struggles. ‘Oh, Horace!’ she cried, faintly, hiding her face in her hand. The question humiliated her. She was ashamed, mortified, offended; and at the same time stung to the heart by the contrast between the state of her feelings and his opinion of them. Happy! was there any meaning in the word? But, fortunately, no thought of this crossed Stapylton’s mind. He was full of the comfort of his dinner and his rest, and the indigenous toddy which steamed by his elbow. Ease and that genial influence had mollified him, and made him complacent. He took Isabel’s confusion for the evidence of a shy rapture.

‘You were always a shy little fool,’ he said, kissing her; ‘but I know you were never so happy before. Trust me to know it. You have never told me the secrets of your prison-house, but I can guess them. By Jove! you should be grateful to a man when you find yourself delivered out of that tomb, and brought safe off here, to be made a pet of. It’s all very well to pretend, and to make up a pretty little scene, like that you treated me to this morning; but I know you can’t care for that brat of a baby, nor put it in comparison with me.’

‘Oh, Horace, let me love my child!’ cried Isabel. ‘I will love you all the better—don’t take my little one from me! I will serve you on my knees—I will study your every look, if you will but consent that I should love my own child.’

‘And what should you do if I did not consent?’ he said, with a smile. ‘You would cry very prettily, Isabel, I know, and make a scene as all women do, but you’d give in at the end. Now, why not give in at the beginning, and save yourself all the trouble? Do you think there is any doubt, my love, who would conquer at the last?’

‘Yes,’ she said, in a voice scarcely audible, trying to free herself from his arms. ‘There is a doubt—for I might die.’

‘What has your dying to do with it? No, my love. You’ll give in to me and do your duty, and we’ll be as happy as the day is long,’ he said, and with another kiss let her go free. ‘Now give me the paper, and I’ll read you the news. All sorts of things have been happening, and we have been too happy to mind; but now, you know, it is time to think of our duties, now we’ve come back to the world.’