He could only gaze at her, wondering if her mind were unhinged; but hasty Isabel, all ablaze with passion and misery, could not stop to think. She took up the letter--her lover’s letter, and thrust it into his rival’s hand. ‘If it is my doing--oh, never speak to me again!’ she cried. Shame and anger, and disappointment and anguish, were all tearing her asunder. And she had no Margaret to go to, to relieve her. Someone must give her that support and solace which her heart demanded, or she felt she must die. She hung upon his looks as he read it, reading his expression. ‘Could it be my fault?’ she cried. ‘Oh, Mr. Lothian, was I such a light lass? Was it anything I did that made him write like that to me?’ ‘No, Isabel,’ he said, with a blaze of rage in his eyes, taking her feverish hand. ‘No, Isabel. My dear, think no more of it. It is that he understands neither yours nor you.’ And then instinctively, in an instant, hasty Isabel felt the mistake she had made, and felt that she could not bear any criticisms upon her lover even now. She took back her letter as suddenly as she had given it, and folded it up with trembling hands. ‘He does not understand,’ said Mr. Lothian, altogether unconscious of this rapid revolution. ‘You speak a language he cannot comprehend. The women he knows are a different species. Isabel, I have never said a word against him----’ ‘No,’ she cried, hurriedly. ‘No; I am always a fool, and never know what I am doing. No. Dinna say a word now.’ Then he stopped suddenly, the very words arrested on his lips, and gazed at her wondering, not knowing what she could mean. ‘You don’t understand me either,’ cried Isabel. ‘Oh, not a word--not a word! You cannot judge him right; you never saw him like me. He was bewildered with the news; he never meant that.’ ‘If I were to say the like, would you ever forgive me?’ said the minister, shaking his head. She answered only by weeping, a mode of reply which took all power of remonstrance or protestation away from the spectator. A hundred contradictory emotions were in Isabel’s tears. Shame and pain over the letter; shame still sharper, if not so deep, that she had offered it to the criticism of another; wrath against Stapylton; rage at herself; and a certain bitterness against her companion for not taking her lover’s part to her, for not contradicting her, and pleading his rival’s cause. She could not have spoken all this wild jumble of pain and passion; but she poured it all forth in tears. It was the postscript which had specially excited her, and which ran as follows:--