She got into the cab, and sat down by Mairi, and then took the girl’s hand. “I am sorry to take you away, Mairi,” she said; but she was apparently not thinking of Mairi, nor of the house she was leaving, nor yet of the vehicle in which she was so strangely placed. Was she thinking of a certain wild and wet day in the far Hebrides, when a young bride stood on the decks of a great vessel and saw the home of her childhood and the friends of her youth fade back into the desolate waste of the sea? Perhaps there may have been some unconscious influence in this picture to direct her movements at this moment, for of definite resolves she had none. When Mairi told her that the cabman wanted to know whither he was to drive, she merely answered: “Oh, yes, Mairi, we will go to the station;” and Mairi added, addressing the man: “It was the Euston Station.” Then they drove away. “Are you going home?” said the young girl, looking up with a strange foreboding and sinking of the heart to the pale face and distant eyes--“are you going home, Miss Sheila?” “Oh, yes, we are going home, Mairi,” was the answer she got, but the tone in which it was uttered filled her mind with doubt, and something like despair. PART IX. CHAPTER XIX. A NEW DAY BREAKS. Was this, then, the end of the fair and beautiful romance that had sprung up and blossomed so hopefully in the remote and bleak island, amid the silence of the hills and moors and the wild twilights of the North, and set around about, as it were, by the cold sea-winds and the sound of the Atlantic waves? Who could have fancied, looking at those two young folks as they wandered about the shores of the island, as they sailed on the still moonlight nights through the channels of Loch Roag, or as they sang together of an evening in the little parlor of the house at Borvapost, that all the delight and wonder of life then apparently opening out before them was so soon and so suddenly to collapse, leaving them in outer darkness and despair? All their difficulties had been got over. From one side and from another they had received generous help, friendly advice, self-sacrifice, to start them on a path that seemed to be strewn with sweet-smelling flowers. And here was the end--a wretched girl, blinded and bewildered, flying from her husband’s house and seeking refuge in the great world of London, careless whither she went. Whose was the fault? Which of them had been mistaken up there in the North, laying the way open for a bitter disappointment? Or had either of them failed to carry out that unwritten contract entered into in the halcyon period of courtship, by which young people promise to be and remain to each other all that they then appeared?