Thus they separated, the sisters with their candles retiring to their little parlour--the lights in the window of which were watched by more than one watcher from far, with tender thoughts of the young inmates. But Margaret was weary--too weary--for the counsel she had to give. She went to bed leaving Isabel, the latest of all the house, sitting alone, in a fever of thought which she could now indulge for the first time. The lonely little window sent a feeble ray upon the hill-side road, and was visible on the Loch to such a late hour as seldom witnessed any window alight in Loch Diarmid. There were many causes for the tumult of fancies which absorbed the girl and made her forget the progress of time. The very air around her was full of excitement; her sister for anything she knew might the next day rise healed from her bed. She herself might be free as the winds to choose her own life; and it was at the very climax and crisis of this life that Isabel stood. CHAPTER III It will have been guessed by what has been already said that one of the periodical fits of religious excitement to which every primitive country is liable, had lately taken place in the parish of Loch Diarmid. There had been a general quickening of popular interest in religious matters. Religion had taken a new meaning to the fervid primitive mind. A miraculous world, all glowing with undeveloped forces, rose up around them. The end might be that the Lord would come, bringing confusion to His enemies and triumph to His people, or, at least, that such supernatural endowments would come as should make poor men and peasant maidens the reformers of the world. At the first outset there was something splendid, something exalting, in this hope. And the strange story which a short time before had run round the Loch as by magic gave it instant confirmation. Ailie Macfarlane, a young woman known to be hopelessly ill, who had been visited, and sympathised with, and ministered to by all the kindly gossips of the parish--whose parents had been condoled with on her approaching loss--and whose symptoms were as well known to the community as their several and individual sufferings, had risen up all at once from her sick bed and gone out on a journey at the call of faith. The astonished parish had suddenly encountered her afoot upon its public roads, yet knew with a certainty beyond all power of deception, that the day before she had been a helpless sufferer.