"It's been this head of mine that's been my undoing, Jock," she answered, between her sobs. "All the trouble has come from that." MacColl was off for Dr. McMurtrie before daybreak, and I sat holding Nancy's hand waiting for his coming, with Pitcairn's ancient statement going round and round clatter-mill in my brain: "Ye can't educate a woman as ye can a man. With six thousand years of heredity, the physiology of the female sex, and the Lord himself against you, I'm thinking it wise for you to have your daughter reared like other women, to fulfil woman's great end," and pondering over the fact that the great lawyer and Nancy herself seemed to have come to exactly the same conclusion. I was alarmed by her pallor and exhaustion, but McMurtrie assured me that a sleeping potion would set her far along the road to recovery; and at breakfast, after Nancy had fallen into an induced sleep, unknown to himself he gave me what I felt to be the key to the whole bitter suffering she was enduring, suffering, I feared, which came from a love learned too late. "Your friend Sandy will be a grandfather soon, I see," said the old doctor, beaming at me over his glasses as he drank his tea. This was the beginning of a troubled time for all of us, and one which a partial biographer of Danvers Carmichael would like to slur over or leave untold entirely, for it seemed that neither reason nor self-respect could do anything with him in his thirst for Nancy's society. As soon as she was about again he was over at Stair, the excuse being some presents which he had brought us from the strange lands he had been visiting; his constant thought of her, even upon his bridal tour, being plainly shown by these: a ring from Venice, of wrought gold with aquamarines, some Spanish embroideries, quaint carvings; and finally he put the cap upon his extravagance by producing from an inner pocket a girdle of Egyptian workmanship, too valuable by far for her to accept from him. "Surely, Dandy," I broke in at this, "ye must see that Nancy, no matter what the old-time affection between us may be, can not take such gifts from you?" "Why not?" he answered, looking straight at me. "It might be misinterpreted," I began, lamely. "By whom?" he inquired. "Not by us," I replied, "but by others." "And what others are to know?" he demanded. "I am not going to make the matter of a gift public business." There was something in me which made it impossible to mention his wife to him, but Nancy said, with gentleness and great wisdom, as it seemed to me: "They are beautiful, and I would love to have them from you, Danvers; and some time, when Isabel and I become great friends, I'll ask them of you, maybe; but I can not take them now."