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 Stapylto{278}n’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{279} 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 everythi............