Neil Drummond had no great gifts. He was only a simple, honest soul who did his duty according to his lights, but in that moment he tasted to the full at once the anguish and the high joy of renunciation. Such clear understanding of a woman’s heart came to him that for a moment he forgot the intolerable ache of his own. Isla’s gaze came back and fell upon his face as she answered simply, "I am sure. I would follow him to the end of the world without a question or a doubt, and I would not have a wish apart from his will. That is how I care, Neil. If I could feel like that for you I would give the best years of my life. I didn’t seek this thing," she went on when he made no answer. "It came to me, and I think when it is like that we----we cannot help ourselves, Neil. It is part of the mystery of life. I am so tired with it all that I would wish to-day that I could lie down in Balquhidder beside them." "Your life is only beginning," he said slowly and with difficulty. "I will say good-bye, and I will ask you to believe that there is nothing in the world I want so much as your happiness. You have had none, and, though I am not the man who can give it to you, I ask you to take it--and to take it soon--from the man who can." Thus did Neil Drummond, a commonplace, everyday man such as we meet so often upon the highway, rise to the height of renunciation and prove himself a hero. Isla’s eyes swam in a strange tenderness as she turned to him, trying to thank him. But even while she would have spoken he had left her, and soon she heard the rumble of the wheels on the road--the wheels which took him back to Garrion--never more, in obedience to a lover’s quest, to speed across the rough road to the Moor of Creagh. After a time Isla went back very quietly and soberly to the house to astonish her relatives by another vagary. "I am ready to go to Barras to-morrow, Aunt Jean, and to stop as long as you like." "And will Neil come with us or after us, my dear?" asked Lady Mackinnon, her shrewd eyes lighting up cheerfully. "You know there is room and to spare in the house." "No, Aunt Jean, Neil will not come. I am not going to marry him now--nor any man," she answered. And she sped away to make her preparations for the journey which, an hour before, she thought nothing on earth would induce her to undertake. A strange peace seemed to brood that night upon the Lodge of Creagh and the Moor of Silence. Sleep was very far from Isla’s eyes as she sat before her uncurtained window, looking out upon the limitless space on which the white moonlight lay. The end of all things had come, so far as human judgment could determine. The last Mackinnon of Achree slept with his forefathers, and she, a poor weak woman of no account, was left to tie up the broken threads. Her thoughts of Malcolm were very tender, nor had she any misgiving, thinking of where he might be.