Of the future which lay beyond his arrival at Whanland he scarcely allowed himself to think, nor did he arrange any definite plan of action. Circumstances should guide him completely and what information he could get from Jimmy Stirk. He had no doubt at all of Cecilia’s courage, once they should meet, and he felt that in him which must sweep away every opposition which anyone could bring. He would force her to come with him. There were only two people in the world--himself and the woman he loved--and he was ready, if need be, to go to the very altar and take her from it. She had cried out and the echo of her voice had reached him in far-away Spain. Now, there was no power on earth which should stand before him. So he went on, intent on nothing but the end of his journey; looking no further; and holding back from his brain, lest it should overwhelm him, the too-intoxicating thought that, in a couple of weeks, she might be his. When, at last, from a point of rising ground a few miles from the seaboard, he saw the waters of the English Channel, his heart leaped. He drove into Havre just at sunset on the evening of the twenty-fifth of March. Six days later he was in London. He had hoped to reach it earlier, but it was with the greatest difficulty that he was able to get a passage to Portsmouth; he had crossed to England in a wretched fishing-boat and that bad weather, predicted on the French shore and only risked by the boat’s owner for a large sum of money, met and delayed him. He saw the dark mass of Edinburgh Castle rising from the lights of the town on the second evening after his departure from London; the speech which surrounded the coach, as it drew up, made him realize, with a thrill, that now, only two divisions of his journey lay between him and Blackport--Blackport where he would meet Jimmy, perhaps hear from him that he had seen Cecilia. Next morning found him on the road to Perth, where he was to sleep that night. The weather was cold and gusty on the last day of his travels, and the Tay, as they crossed it after leaving Perth, yellow and swollen; but the familiar wide fields and the distant wall of the Grampians stirred his heart with their promise. The road ran up the Vale of Strathmore, north-east of the Sidlaws; as their undulations fell away they would stretch to Kaims and the sea, and he would once more be in that enchanted spot of land where the North Lour ran and the woods of Morphie unrolled themselves across its seaward course. The last change of horses was at Forfar; from there, they were to run through the great moor of Monrummon into Blackport, where they would be due at eight o’clock. If he could secure anything which had wheels from one of the posting-houses, he would sleep that night at Whanland.