As this is but an episode in my story, I may here follow Margaret’s uncomfortable wooing to its end. Poor Harry, tantalized and driven desperate by a letter, which seemed, to Margaret, the most gently temporising in the world, and which was intended to keep him from despair, and to retain her hold upon him until Willie’s purposes were fully manifested, at last made his appearance at Loch Arroch Head, where she was paying the Campbells a visit, on the day after Edgar left the loch. He came determined to hear his fate decided one way or another, almost ill with the excitement in which he had been kept, wilder than ever in the sudden passion which had seized upon him like an evil spirit. He met her, on his unexpected arrival, walking with Willie, who, having nothing else to do, did not object to amuse his leisure with his beautiful cousin, whose devotion to him, I fear, he knew. Poor Margaret! I know her behaviour was ignoble, but I regret--as I have confessed to the reader--that she did not become the great lady she might have been; and, notwithstanding that Edgar’s position would have been deeply complicated thereby, I wish the field had been left clear for Harry Thornleigh, who would have made her a good enough husband, and to whom she would have made, in the end, a very sweet wife. Forgive me, young romancist, I cannot help this regret. Even at that moment Margaret did not want to lose her young English Squire, and her friends were so far from wanting to lose him that Harry, driven to dire disgust, hated them ever after with a strenuous hatred, which he transferred to their nation generally, not knowing any better. He lingered for a day or more, waiting for the answer which Margaret was unwilling to give, and tortured by Willie, who, seeing the state of affairs, felt his vanity involved, and was more and more loverlike to his cousin. The issue was that Harry rushed away at last half mad, and went abroad, and wasted his substance more than he had ever done up to that moment, damaged his reputation, and encumbered his patrimony, and fell into that state of cynical disbelief in everybody, which, bad as are its effects even upon the cleverest and brightest intelligence, has a worse influence still upon the stupid, to whom there is no possibility of escape from its withering power.