‘My dear,’ said the old minister, who with all his sympathy could not let such a speech pass unrebuked, ‘she has her Father in Heaven. She has the Father of the fatherless. You must not build on your youth and strength. Have we not all seen what awful change and overturn may happen in a single day?’ And then Isabel looked up at him with her tear-dilated, smiling eyes. It was cruel to thrust back upon her at such a moment the terrible tragedy in which she had such a part. But even that did not discourage the young mother. Two great tears wrung out of their fountains, as if her heart had been suddenly grasped by some harsh hand, dropped from her eyes. Before they fell she had already turned her head with a little start, that they might not drop upon the child. ‘I’ll live for her,’ she said. ‘Oh I’ll have strength for her--God would never have me leave my baby alone in the world.’ And then the smile came back--an invincible smile, not to be quenched by any discouragement. When she was left alone even, and had no longer that stimulus of self-defence and resistance which came natural to her character, in the silence she still kept her smile. There, where Margaret had died--where she herself had stood up in her white simplicity of maidenhood to be married, she sat by the imperfect light of the fire with her baby asleep on her knees, and defied all fear and sorrow. All the frivolous thoughts of youth had died out of her (so far as she was aware) as much as if she had been Miss Catherine’s age. No longing for any love beyond the one she possessed was in her heart. Her sister, and her husband, whom she could scarcely dissociate now the one from the other, had left her on the way. But did not this make amends--this which no one could take away, which was altogether her own? ‘Has the lassie no heart?’ said the Dominie, as he attended Miss Catherine down the brae. His own was sore for his friend. The minister had been to him a profounder loss than to Isabel; the solace of his life, his companion, the occupation of those evenings which were all that remained to him to enjoy in this world, had all gone with Mr. Lothian. And to think his friend could have thrown away all his love on an insensible woman who could smile over her baby, and forget him so soon! ‘This time twelvemonth he was planning where he was to take her--how he was to please her; and now---- Have women no hearts?’ ‘Her heart is full of her child,’ said Miss Catherine, with a touch of personal compunction, for she, too, had been thinking of the baby, and not of its father. ‘You forget--she was fond of him, and grateful to him, but she might have been his daughter. It was not love like--what was thought of in my day.’ ‘Or in mine,’ said the Dominie.