“You must just think it over well,” he said, “and let me know later what you decide. If your mother does not approve, I will try to think of something else, but if she does, there is no time to be lost. You must begin to study in January, with a view to getting through in July, and I will pay all the fees for you. I was obliged to speak to you to-night, my dear, because I must return to London to-morrow, and I may not have another opportunity. You are a brave girl. God will help you to do the right,” and with a suspicious moisture in his eyes he stooped and kissed her forehead, and went out leaving her alone. Then it was that the flood-gates were opened, and throwing herself down in the chair where her father had been wont to sit so often, she gave way to hopeless, heart-broken weeping. She had said little enough to her uncle, but in reality the news had been a terrible shock to her; it had never entered her head for a moment that they must leave the old home. Even now it seemed utterly impossible—as if it were better that they should all three lie quietly in the churchyard beside their beloved dead, than go away from the loch and the mountains and leave him there in the churchyard alone! When he weeping had spent itself, she remembered Jack and how he was waiting for her at the boat-house, but just for the moment she felt too exhausted to rise. Presently, however, she dragged herself up, and with a long, sobbing breath, turned to the door and crept noiselessly through the hall to the garden, and made her way down across the railway track to the spot where she and Jack had met so often to go upon one of their many madcap escapades. He was leaning against a post, lost in thought, and he started a little when her light footstep sounded on the shingle. “Is that you Paddy!” he asked. “Yes, Jack!” came the answer, and he felt vaguely that there were tears in her voice. He went forward with outstretched hands, and took her unresisting ones, trying to see into her face. “I thought you were never coming,” he said. She gulped down a sob, and big tears splashed upon his hand. “What is it!” he asked, feeling cold suddenly. The little wavelets hushed their singing, a twittering bird stopped to listen; over the majestic sleeping mountains, the shining stars, the steadfast heavens, the sentinel trees, the shimmering, wistful loch, there seemed to spread the hush of a spirit of pain, as he heard her say in a trembling voice: “We have to leave The Ghan House, and the mountains, and the loch, and go and begin over again somewhere else.” He said nothing—what was there to say! To both of them the words were like a sentence of doom. CHAPTER XIX In Which the Worst Came.