Thus life went on for months over Loch Diarmid. The minister’s dreadful end had fallen into gentle forgetfulness. Another minister was now the referee and head and butt of the parish, discussed in the smithy, criticised ‘at the doors.’ And he and his wife had been asked to dinner at the neighbouring country-houses, but not with so much success as had attended the dÉbut of Isabel—and had called upon Mrs. Lothian, ‘the last minister’s widow,’ as the present female incumbent described her, and had not known very well what to make of the girl in her close cap, smiling over her baby—with her strange surroundings, and curious nondescript position. Mrs. Russell, the new minister’s wife, asked with a good deal of perplexity, ‘Is she a lady? I know she is a great friend of Miss Catherine. But everybody knows Miss Catherine is very odd. Dined at the Marquis’s in London, and went to the opera with Lady Mary! I can scarcely believe that. How could Lady Mary, an unmarried girl, take anybody to the opera? She does everything for that child herself—no nurse, nor anything like a nurse; indeed, I am not sure there was any servant at all. The woman I saw in the kitchen was her stepmother, I hear. Naturally it is not very pleasant for us to have the widow of Mr. Russell’s predecessor in such a position. Of course I would like to be kind to her if I could, but—— And then the way the people speak of her! For one that calls her Mrs. Lothian, there are half a dozen that say just Isabel, or Isabel at the Glebe, or the Captain’s Isabel, or some country name like that. I can tell you it’s very embarrassing for me.’

This little statement, which was made to Mrs. Campbell of Maryburgh, the nearest clergywoman of the district, and to Mrs. Diarmid of Ardgartan, and even to the doctor’s wife in the parish, got into circulation through the malice or amusement of these ladies, and roused a little flutter of indignation on Loch Diarmid, where Isabel’s position was so fully understood, and where she was known beyond all controversy to be a lady born—whereas of Mrs. Russell herself nobody knew anything. But it did not disturb the quiet at the Glebe, where Baby Margaret reigned supreme, shutting out all the outer world with her small presence, her quick coming smiles, the gradual ‘notice’ she took of the external world to which she had come, her first recognition of the devoted vassals about her. Her first little pearly tooth was a greater event than the Reform Bill, which happened somewhere about that time; and it may well be supposed that the first time the small princess visibly indicated her knowledge and preference of her mother was more to Isabel than if the Queen had called upon her, much less Lady Mary. The cottage was all absorbed and wrapt up in the child for that first year of her existence. On the whole, perhaps, it is no great testimony to the female intelligence, that it can thus permit itself to be swallowed up in adoring contemplation and tendance of a helpless, speechless infant, with no intellectual existence at all.

‘I cannot understand you women,’ said the Dominie; ‘if she keeps content it is more than I can fathom. No—if her heart had been dead like the hearts of some—but her heart has never been right awakened; and if there was any word, say of that English lad——’

‘Lord, preserve us!’ cried Miss Catherine, holding up her hands in dismay; ‘you don’t mean to say, Mr. Galbraith, that we’re threatened with him back.’

‘I say only what I hear,’ said the Dominie. ‘They were saying in John Macwhirter’s last night that he had been seen looking at the beasts on Smeaton’s farm; and he should be well known at Smeaton’s farm, if anywhere. There’s a fine breed of cattle to be roupit.’

‘Oh, yes, I know all about that,’ said Miss Catherine, who had endeavoured in vain to secure some of the cattle in question. ‘Archie Smeaton’s a worldly-minded body, and ay hankering after more siller. But to bring that lad back—the only man I have any fear of in the world! No, no, it is you that makes me doubt poor Isabel. With her bairn in her arms there’s no man in the world she would ever look at; we need not fear that.’

The Dominie shook his head. ‘It may be nature,’ he said; ‘you should know better than me—but at three-and-twenty, to give up all your life to an infant, and never seek more in this world, is what I cannot comprehend. If her heart was crushed and dead it might be so, but that is not the case. I am not saying you are right or you are wrong, but it’s very strange to me.’

‘And for one thing, she must not know,’ said Miss Catherine, with an anxious look in her face; ‘neither you nor me will say a word to let her know?’

The Dominie turned away with a grim smile. ‘If that is all your certainty,’ he said, ‘there’s no such great difference between us.’ They exchanged a few more anxious words, standing together half-way up the ascent, and then Miss Catherine continued her walk towards the Glebe.

‘You have heard of something that vexes you,’ said Isabel, when, after all due court had been paid to the little princess, Miss Catherine sat wearily down and sank into a kind of abstraction; and then the old lady roused herself up with a guilty start.

‘Me!—no,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘what could I have that would vex me?—except just one thing, Isabel, my dear, if you will promise not to be frightened. There’s measles about. Jenny Spence’s second youngest—the one that was the baby——’

‘But he’s better,’ said Isabel, breathless. ‘It was last month he was ill.’

‘You can never say when they’re better,’ said Miss Catherine, solemnly; ‘and I heard they had it up at the toll on the Kilcranion road; and if one of the Chalmers’ bairns has not the whooping-cough, my ears are not to be trusted. But you must not be frightened. I was thinking if we were to take a week or two at the Bridge of Allan——’

‘Oh, my darling!’ Isabel was saying, with her lips on her baby’s cheek, whom she had seized out of its cradle in her panic. Miss Catherine’s guilty heart smote her, but she was not a woman to be diverted by a mere compunction from pursuing what she felt to be the safe way.

‘My dear, you promised me not to take any panic,’ she said; ‘there is no occasion. You take your walks on the braes, and not through the village; and Margaret has never been so far all her days as the toll-gate. But just to keep you easy, and her clear of all danger, I think you and me, Isabel, might go cannily away to the Bridge of Allan to-morrow. It would do us both good.’

‘You would not say that, if you thought there was no danger,’ said Isabel. ‘Oh, what would I do if anything happened to my darling? Should I take her away to-night?’

‘There is no such hurry as that,’ said Miss Catherine; and then turned to confront Jean Campbell, whom it was more difficult to blind, and with whom it had been impossible to have any private communication. ‘We are going off to the Bridge of Allan,’ she said, with a faint conciliatory smile; ‘we are just making up our minds all at once. A change would do Isabel good; and as for the child, babies are always the better for a change of air.’

‘And there’s measles in the village, and whooping-cough,’ said Isabel, pressing her baby to her heart.

‘No such thing,’ said Jean. ‘Measles!—Jenny Spence’s bairns had them, but they’re all better a month ago; and there’s nae kink-cough I’ve heard of atween this and Maryburgh. Na, if it’s for your pleasure, that’s different. But eh! dinna tempt Providence by getting into a panic when there’s nae trouble near.’

‘I think you’re wrong about the kink-cough,’ said Miss Catherine. ‘There’s one of Peter Chalmers’s boys——’

‘He’s had that cough as long as I can mind,’ said Jean. ‘Na, na, my bonnie woman, dinna you be feared; there’s naething catching in the parish but I’m sure to hear of it. Put down the bairn, and let her sleep.’

‘Well, I am of a different opinion,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘and I’m wearying for a change. I’ll take my maid, Marion, who is very experienced about bairns, and we’ll start in the morning to-morrow with the boat. I cannot stay, Isabel, my dear. Keep up a good heart, and the fine air yonder will make you look like two roses, the baby and you.—— Lord preserve us, woman!’ said Miss Catherine, turning round upon Jean, to whom she had made a sign to follow her, as soon as they were outside the door, ‘could ye not see I had a reason? and was making you signs enough to rouse a whole parish—if she had not been so taken up with the bairn.’

‘Me!—how could I tell?’ said Jean, surprised; ‘and I couldna find it in my heart to put her in such trouble, and it no true.’

‘Nonsense about putting her in trouble!’ said Miss Catherine, energetically. ‘Perhaps you would like better to wring her heart, and bring in another man to her, and turn all her peace to distress once more.’

‘What man?’ asked Jean, seizing with instant penetration the point at question.

‘Yon English lad!’

‘Eh, me!’ said Jean Campbell, ‘blessings on you for a quick thought, and a quicker act. I heard he had been seen over the hill. I’ll swear it’s the kink-cough!’ she added, under her breath; and so the bargain was made.

It was the first night of pain Isabel had spent since her baby was born. It seemed to her as if she ought to get up and fly away with her through the darkness, to escape from so terrible a danger; and she went back a hundred times to the cradle after the little Margaret had been disposed of for the night to listen to her breathing, and look at her little rosebud face, and touch her tiny fingers, and make sure she had not caught anything.

‘The bairn’s as well as ever she was in her life,’ Jean said at last, with a little impatience, as this process went on.

‘But you said there was whooping-cough about,’ said Isabel.

‘I said it might be,’ said Jean, ‘for anything I ken; but, eh, why do you think our bairn should get it, and no other bairn a’ the country round?’

‘Because she is all I have in the world,’ said Isabel, with a sudden fall out of the soft content in which her life had been wrapped.

Jean did not know of the revolution which that moment made. She saw the brown eyes open wide and flash in the soft, domestic light, but had no insight to perceive how Isabel had suddenly stumbled, as it were, against the limits of her lot, and woke up to see that her happiness was as a flower on the edge of a precipice, that all her life was concentrated in this one blossom, against which nature itself, and the winds and the rains, and the summer heats and the autumn chill, were ready to rise up. Most mothers have gone through that same sudden gleam of imagination, and beheld Heaven and earth contending against the child in whose frail ship of life all their venture of happiness was embarked. Isabel saw herself standing as on the brink of a more dreadful destruction than she had ever dreamt of, and her very soul failed within her. It could not last. Before any new influence came in, the Dominie’s words had proved themselves, though in a sense different from anything he understood.

‘Oh, if harm were to come to her!’ cried Isabel, with a sudden, low, stifled cry.

‘Weel, weel,’ said Jean, in her calm voice, ‘that’s what you’re ay thinking as soon as ye hae weans. What if everything should gang against ye? what if trouble should come in a moment, and leave a’ the rest, and strike yours? Ye mustna gie way to that, Isabel. What if the lift were to fa’ and smoor the laverocks? No, no, my bonnie woman! It’s no you nor me that can guard the bairn from whatever’s coming, but just God—if it’s His will.’

‘And if it were not His will?’ said Isabel, driven from despair to despair.

‘Then ye would have to submit,’ said Jean, didactic and almost solemn, ‘as you’ve done before. There’s nae striving against God.’

And then silence fell upon the little grey room, in which the fire flickered cheerfully, and the child slept, and Isabel’s heart beat. It had been beating so quietly up to this moment, and now what wild throbs it gave against her breast! Ah, yes! God’s will had to be submitted to, whatever it was—God’s will, which had carried Margaret, twenty years old, to her bed in the churchyard, and laid the minister in his blood beside her. ‘Oh,’ sighed Isabel, ‘to be with them! to have everything over that must happen! to rest and know that nothing could happen more!’

‘And mony folk would tell ye,’ said Jean, momentarily forgetting her compact with Miss Catherine, ‘that to run away as soon as ye hear of trouble was tempting Providence, as if God couldna smite in the steamboat or the coast, as well as in your ain house. No that I’m of that way of thinking,’ she added, hastily recollecting herself. ‘This change will do the bairn good, and it will do you good, and relieve your mind. Na, Isabel, ye must not take fancies into your head, or think that things are worse than they are. There’s little Margaret the picture of health.’

Isabel turned away, and threw herself down noiselessly on her knees by the side of her child’s cradle. The baby’s breathing was regular and soft; its hand was thrown up over its head, with the unconscious grace of infancy; its attitude full of ease and perfect repose.

She lay all the night through with her child breathing sweetly beside her, debating the question with herself—Should she remain, and put her fate into God’s hands, and perhaps propitiate Him by such an appearance of trust? She did not sleep, but lay in the rustling palpable darkness, sometimes fancying the child’s breathing grew hurried, sometimes that it stopped altogether, and looking all kinds of horrors in the face. She rose from her bed in the same uncertainty; and the day was cold, and Jean wavered, doubting whether such an uncertain and distant danger as that of the ‘English lad’s’ reappearance was sufficient inducement for the immediate sacrifice demanded of her.

‘I doubt it’s an east wind,’ Jean said, as she went into Isabel’s room to call her; ‘I doubt it’s tempting Providence;’ and went about all her arrangements languidly, with no goodwill in them. ‘I’ll put in all her warm winter things,’ she said, as she packed the box for them; ‘ye maun take awfu’ care of cold. Travelling is ay dangerous, and at her age, the bonnie lamb!’

‘Oh, tell me,’ said Isabel, suddenly throwing her arms round her stepmother’s neck. ‘I am distracted, thinking one thing and another. Should I go, or should I stay——?’

Jean paused. She was put on her honour. It was hard to part with the baby, and allow old Marion, Miss Catherine’s maid, to get her hands upon it. But she had given her word. And then ‘another man’ was something too frightful to be contemplated; and Isabel was young, and had once loved Stapylton, or thought she loved him. It was hard upon her stepmother to be obliged to decide; but she did so magnanimously for Isabel’s good.

‘It’s no so cold as I thought,’ she said. ‘The wind’s only in the north. It’s no a warm wind, but it’s no dangerous, like the east; and if you keep her well and keep her warm, and no trust too much to Marion, who knows nothing about bairns, no doubt a change of air would do her good.’

And after a while Miss Catherine’s carriage came to the door, and took the mother and the child away.