‘And so I do think of her,’ cried Isabel, straining the child so passionately to her breast that little Margaret, unused to such violence, began to whimper with fright, and put out her baby arms to Miss Catherine. Then Isabel’s excitement broke forth in weeping. She almost thrust the child into Miss Catherine’s arms, and covered her face with her hands. ‘_She_ turns from me too,’ she cried, with floods of sudden burning tears. And little Margaret, half for sympathy, out of an infant’s strange forlorn consciousness of something unusual in the air, cried too, and the scene altogether became so painful that Miss Catherine lost heart. ‘I cannot understand you, Isabel,’ she said. ‘There are no memories here to make you heart-broken like this, and nobody is turning from you that I know of. I have come away with you myself, though I’ve plenty to do at home. And there is not one of your friends but would make a sacrifice to see you happy. What is the matter? You have always been happy with your baby. Why should you change now?’ ‘I have not changed.’ said Isabel, under her breath. ‘I hope not, my dear,’ said Miss Catherine, giving back the child into her arms. ‘I suppose it is coming out into the world for the first time, and seeing--strangers; and coming to a new place. I would not wonder, for my part; but you have ay been so good, and so reasonable and patient--since _she_ came.’ ‘And so I shall be,’ said Isabel, hastily drying her eyes; ‘as long as she is well, oh, what can harm me? I want nothing but my lamb.’ And then she began, with a thousand caresses, to undress the little weary creature, kissing its round limbs and dimples with a kind of passion. Miss Catherine sat looking on somewhat grimly, not understanding this outbreak of feeling more than the other, but unable in any way to connect either Isabel’s tears or her demonstrations of maternal adoration with that unlucky encounter in the boat. She did not understand, and she could not sympathise, but sat looking on with that grim air of observation and criticism which winds an excited mind up to almost delirium. Isabel finished her task under those severe, yet kindly eyes, growing more and more agitated and nervous. She was in the state so common to women, when tears are the only practicable utterance. Tears, meaningless words in Margaret’s ear, who could soothe but not understand, and such quietness as she might have had in her own house, would have composed her after the shock she had received; but Miss Catherine’s steady presence, restraining the tears and compelling a certain amount of external self-control, prolonged the inward pain, and the evening passed like a painful dream. ‘It cannot be the recollections of the place,’ said Miss Catherine to her maid, when Isabel had escaped to her room, ‘for I cannot recollect that the poor minister was ever here; and it cannot be any fright about the bairn. There’s neither measles nor whooping-cough that we know of in this place.’