"Married Isa----" I was beginning again, in a highly intelligent manner, when Huey MacGrath suddenly dropped the tray of dishes he was bringing in and carried his hands to his face, beginning to moan and cry like a woman, for it had been the wish of his heart to have these two children, who in some way he believed to be his own, married to each other. The disturbance was a good thing for all, for it broke the unnatural tension between us, and after MacColl had assisted Huey into the pantry, where I could see him standing, listening at the doorway, Sandy continued: "It was all that talking, grape-eyed woman! It was for that she fetched her daughter to Arran. It's been going on right under my eye, and I too blind and taken up with my own affairs to see it The poor laddie," he cried. "The poor fool laddie!" Understanding that a discussion of the marriage in her presence was an impossibility, Nancy left us, with a white face, on some pretense of business at the Burnside, and Sandy and I talked it out between us. Midnight found us going back and forth over the matter and arriving at the same point, that the chances of happiness for a man wedded to one woman and in love with another are just nothing at all. I could feel that there was one question in Sandy's mind which he could scarce bring himself to ask, and I took the suggestion of it upon myself. "It will bring many changes to us," I said, "and to none more than Nancy." "Do you think she cares for him?" Sandy asked, putting his thought plainly. "To be frank with ye, Sandy," said I, "it's a matter I've been far from deciding. I believe that the visit to Mauchline changed her more than any other event in her life. Before it she'd idealized gift and the possession of it. When she came back she was changed in a way. 'It's a great thing to be a gentleman; I think it's more in the end than being a genius, Jock,' she said, and by this, as well as other speeches of hers, I am convinced that her mind had turned toward Danvers, and if he had come to her with any kindness at all, things would have been settled between them; but he burst in storming, poor fellow, like a crazy loon, and a fine quarrel they had of it, with this marriage as a resulting." "There's one small good comes out of it all, which is that the paste-covered woman gets out of Arran to-day," Sandy ended. "It's a thing she had not counted upon, but Danvers wrote that they were off to the Continent, and it's not respectable for her to stay alone with me, and she packs for Carlisle to-morrow."