In short, poor Agnes had distrusted everybody. She had distrusted Miss Heriot up to the last moment. She distrusted her still, notwithstanding Isabell’s better instinct. She looked at the two together at the present moment with a watchful eye, not half sure that they were not plotting something against, rather than in favour of her search. When she heard them speak of the loss of time, her heart swelled within her. She who had done everything so carefully, so warily, letting nobody know, treating everybody as enemies, making so many subtle, simple schemes to entrap the missing witnesses, was it possible that, after all, she had been letting the precious moments slip out of her hand, the last days of her sister’s life? Agnes was glad to go away, leaving the last and only possible traces of the missing Macgregors in Marjory’s hands, to go out to the silence of the long seaside walk, and to cast her troubled mind abroad to seek out new means of working. She knelt down under the shadow of the Maiden’s Rock, in a crevice of that natural tower, and poured out all her passionate heart in an impassioned prayer. “Oh, bring them to me--bring them!” she prayed, demanding a miracle with pathetic earnestness. There are circumstances in which it is more painful to receive help than to be kept without it. Agnes, poor girl, endured the aid which had fallen upon her with a proud agony of submission, feeling that her heart was torn asunder by the necessity. She had so set her heart upon doing it all herself; she had taken pleasure in her hardships and wanderings, her long walks up and down, and the painful inquiries that never came to anything. And oh, if all this had been but a loss of time! She tried to contradict the thought, though a consciousness that it was true would keep creeping chill upon her. But oh, if the Lord would but step in and direct her, and make her find them now! If He would but prove that the race was not to the swift nor the battle to the strong! If He, the last resort, the final resource in everything, would but bring them to her--put them, as it were, in her hand! Agnes opened her eyes, and clambered down from the rocks, her heart aching with the hope that she might yet meet with strangers on the way, and find that her prayer had been answered. But there was no one to be seen on the long stretch of seaside path, not a soul anywhere. And thus in her humiliation she went slowly home, feeling as if this work, the work that might save Isabell’s life, was taken out of her hands. CHAPTER XIII.