Jean did not know of the revolution which that moment made. She saw the brown eyes open wide and flash in the soft, domestic light, but had no insight to perceive how Isabel had suddenly stumbled, as it were, against the limits of her lot, and woke up to see that her happiness was as a flower on the edge of a precipice, that all her life was concentrated in this one blossom, against which nature itself, and the winds and the rains, and the summer heats and the autumn chill, were ready to rise up. Most mothers have gone through that same sudden gleam of imagination, and beheld Heaven and earth contending against the child in whose frail ship of life all their venture of happiness was embarked. Isabel saw herself standing as on the brink of a more dreadful destruction than she had ever dreamt of, and her very soul failed within her. It could not last. Before any new influence came in, the Dominie’s words had proved themselves, though in a sense different from anything he understood. ‘Oh, if harm were to come to her!’ cried Isabel, with a sudden, low, stifled cry. ‘Weel, weel,’ said Jean, in her calm voice, ‘that’s what you’re ay thinking as soon as ye hae weans. What if everything should gang against ye? what if trouble should come in a moment, and leave a’ the rest, and strike yours? Ye mustna gie way to that, Isabel. What if the lift were to fa’ and smoor the laverocks? No, no, my bonnie woman! It’s no you nor me that can guard the bairn from whatever’s coming, but just God--if it’s His will.’ ‘And if it were not His will?’ said Isabel, driven from despair to despair. ‘Then ye would have to submit,’ said Jean, didactic and almost solemn, ‘as you’ve done before. There’s nae striving against God.’ And then silence fell upon the little grey room, in which the fire flickered cheerfully, and the child slept, and Isabel’s heart beat. It had been beating so quietly up to this moment, and now what wild throbs it gave against her breast! Ah, yes! God’s will had to be submitted to, whatever it was--God’s will, which had carried Margaret, twenty years old, to her bed in the churchyard, and laid the minister in his blood beside her. ‘Oh,’ sighed Isabel, ‘to be with them! to have everything over that must happen! to rest and know that nothing could happen more!’ ‘And mony folk would tell ye,’ said Jean, momentarily forgetting her compact with Miss Catherine, ‘that to run away as soon as ye hear of trouble was tempting Providence, as if God couldna smite in the steamboat or the coast, as well as in your ain house. No that I’m of that way of thinking,’ she added, hastily recollecting herself. ‘This change will do the bairn good, and it will do you good, and relieve your mind. Na, Isabel, ye must not take fancies into your head, or think that things are worse than they are. There’s little Margaret the picture of health.’