‘But she’ll not do it,’ said the blacksmith, confidently, wrapping himself all at once in a flaming mist of sparks. Such was the general opinion of the Loch. ‘I canna believe she’ll have the sense,’ Jean Campbell said, to whom it was most important; and after a while the parish almost forgave the minister for his neglect of them in consideration of the interest with which they regarded his suit. Everybody, except Isabel herself, was aware of the conspiracy against her. To herself it appeared strange that Miss Catherine, out of love for her, should leave the Loch and her own home so long, and waste the early summer, which was her favourite season, in the dusty, windy Edinburgh streets. Isabel accepted the sacrifice with the faith of her age in personal attachment, and said to herself that she could never be grateful enough to her old friend. She could not but acknowledge to herself that the change had made of her a new creature. She looked, and thought, and spoke, and felt herself so to do with a touch of soft surprise--like one of the young ladies whom she had sometimes seen at Lochhead. She, too, was a lady born--yet with envy and wonder she had looked at the strangers whose look and air were so different from her own. They were not different now. Insensibly to herself Isabel had acquired another tone and air. Her soft Scottish speech was still as Scotch as ever, but it was changed. She felt herself to move in a different way, all her sensations were different. Sometimes she thought of the Glebe with a thrill of strange alarm. To go back to Jean and her children, and the solitude without books, without variety--could she do it? Or if that was all in store for her, was it not cruel to have brought her to this different life? ‘Now bring me some of your friends from the College, and let her hear you talk,’ said Miss Catherine, in furtherance of her deep design. The minister, whom she addressed, only shook his head with a doubtful smile. ‘What will she care for our talk?’ he said. ‘The nonsense of a ball-room would please her better. She would take my friends for a parcel of old fogies; and so indeed we are.’ ‘And ready to go to the stake for your own notions all the same,’ said Miss Catherine, with much scorn. ‘Are you, or am I, the best judge of what she’ll think? As for ball-rooms, heaven be praised, in her mourning that’s out of the question; and if she set her eyes upon a man under forty, except in the street, it may be your fault, but it shall not be mine.’ ‘Will that serve me, I wonder? or is it fair to her?’ said the scrupulous minister. ‘The more I see of men, the more I feel what fools they all are,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘go and do what I tell you, minister, and leave the rest to me.’