Isla entered quietly, closed the door, and faced the woman with whom she had already spoken twice and who, in some strange way, was mixed up with the tragedy of Malcolm’s life and death. "You’re not surprised to see me, I can see," she said without preliminary. "Did you know I was in Scotland?" "Yes," answered Isla clearly. "Please to sit down and tell me all that you wish to tell me and that it is necessary I should hear. But first, let me ask one question--Are you, were you, my brother’s wife?" She shook her head. "I ought to have been, but I wasn’t. That was the beginning and the end of the trouble. I waited for him so long, and he promised me faithful and true that if I would only wait quietly till he got out of his sea of troubles he would marry me." "I understand," said Isla rather faintly. "Please say no more now, but tell me as quickly as you can what you know about it all." Neither sat down. Isla stood by the table with her white, frail hand on the red baize of the tablecover, her shadowed eyes looking forth with a strange sad pity on the woman’s face. All her high colour had faded, her eyes were dimmed with weeping, she had forgotten to take a pride in her beautiful hair, she looked what she was--a dishevelled and broken creature on whom even a hard heart must needs have had compassion. And Isla’s heart was not hard any more. "Well, you see, Miss Mackinnon," she said, wiping her eyes with her sodden handkerchief, "you don’t want to hear the whole story as to how we got to know each other in India and how fond he was of me and I of him. So I’ll hurry on to where I met you first. I came to Scotland then, because he hadn’t written to me for such a long time and because, when I learned that his father had died and that he had come into the property, I thought it was time I looked after myself. He spoke very fair then--explained how hard up he was and what a tangle everything was in, and he promised that if only I’d wait other six months he’d make everything straight and right. He told me all that right down by the water at Strathyre that night when he rode down from here to see me--the night before you and I met on the London train. Well, I went back to London, because he asked me to trust him a little longer. But I was not very easy in my mind. I kept quiet, living on my little bit of money and doing a bit of needlework and going out occasionally with a friend, but never forgetting that some day I was to be lady here and wife to the man I loved. Then I saw the thing in the paper--that he was going to marry the American woman, and I think that I went mad for a bit. I don’t know quite where I was or what I did. I only know that I rose and went to Scotland straight to the hotel at Lochearnhead, and in the afternoon I walked up to Achree and asked for Mrs. Rodney Payne." "Oh!" said Isla with a little gasp, and she pressed her hand to her heart.