"That you shall not! I shall send Ellen with you. She won't come to India with me, and her home is somewhere in the North." And so it was settled, and in about three weeks' time Ted with his wife and children were steaming down the Channel on a P. & O. boat, and Rowena was travelling up to Scotland with Geraldine's maid. Rowena had kept a bright face to the last. But now she lay in her berth with closed eyes, feeling the chubby soft faces of her little nephews pressed against her cheek, seeing the wistful look in her brother's eyes and the tears in his wife's, and wondering if she would ever see them all again. And then she took herself to task in her usual style. "This won't do at all! You've been shamefully spoilt these last four years—every one wanting you and making much of you. Those fat years have gone and now comes a lean one. Too much fat makes the liver sluggish. And you lived alone for two years with your poor fretful father, when he never wanted you near him, and wouldn't let you go away from him. Now you are going to live by your lone self, with no one to fret you; and if you can't employ yourself and enjoy yourself as well, I'm sorry for you!" The journey to Scotland was made in driving wind and rain, but though Rowena felt the continual vibration of the train in every joint of her injured spine, she was as cheerful as a cricket, and kept Ellen in constant smiles. "I never did hear a grown-up person talk such nonsense in all my life," she confided to the friendly guard, who took Rowena under his fatherly protection; "but she'd win a smile out of a cow, she would!" Half a day's journey from Glasgow brought them to the last stage of their travels. Ellen was to take Rowena to the Lodge and sleep the night there. The little steamer was waiting to take them up the loch. Rowena insisted upon walking on to it, though she was forced to lean heavily on Ellen's arm. The rain had ceased, and the sun now shone out as it only does in the Highlands, illuminating every mountain height, with soft dreamy radiance. "Ah!" said Rowena, subsiding into a lounge chair upon the deck; "now don't you wish yourself in my shoes, Ellen? And I am not to be torn away from it just when I am taking root, which has always been my fate before—I am going to sink into it and rest in it for three hundred and sixty-five days." "I'm sure, ma'am, I only hope you will have some amusements to beguile the days," said Ellen. She was looking round her with apprehensive eyes. The still silent waters of the loch through which they glided with its walls of green on either side, and the blue ranges of mountain that guarded it upon the horizon, seemed to her a type of prison. Rowena now pointed out a beautiful glen across the loch. A stack of chimneys rose up behind some trees. "That's where we're going," she said. Ellen gave a gentle sigh. "It seems the end of the world," she said, and Rowena's low mellow laugh rang out.