Once she had allowed that terrible idea--that it was her fate--to obtain entrance, and she was lost, for it produced a weak submission that stifled every hope. Drift, drift, drift--resigning herself to what she thought was the inevitable. Some day, she told herself, Jock would come and order her to leave home and all she loved, and follow him wheresoever he willed; and she would have to go. He was her master, her fate; and mingled with her horror of him there was that inexplicable fascination that exercised upon her will the power of the mesmerist upon his patient, and she could fight no more. When it would be she knew not, thought not; only she knew that the time would come, and when it did she could no more resist, no more battle with it, than against that other inevitable point that would end her weary life--when the angel of death would overshadow her with his heavy wings, touch her with icy finger, and bid her away. Always brooding now over these two fixed points in her career--the coming of Jock Morrison and the coming of the end; and so she drifted on. She heard the talk of the wedding that she knew would never be; for if the day did come, and she were taken to the church, she felt that her fate would pluck her from the very altar, or even from her husband's arms. She knew of the love of James Magnus, and she felt a curious kind of pity for one whom she liked and esteemed; but she closed her eyes with a weary smile as she thought of him, for she knew that she was drifting away, and that even to look at him was to give him pain. Drifting still when taken to see the talked-of home, asked opinions upon decorations, and taken by father and sister where she was prepared to be decked for the sacrifice. Drifting, too, at party or ball, where she met Perry-Morton, who always seemed to her like some nebulous mist, that was absorbed and died away in the presence of the giant ever filling her imagination. Go where she would, she felt that she would see him somewhere, though often it was but imagination. Still it kept Jock Morrison always in her mind, and he knew that he was secure of his prize, waiting patiently till she came back from abroad. At first she had felt a kind of sorrow for Perry-Morton, and wanted to warn him of what her fate would be; but the pity gave place to contempt, the contempt to disgust, the disgust to dread; for she felt that if she warned him he would take steps to assert himself, and if he did, she knew in her heart that her fate, as she called him, would not stop at taking his life.