Isabel was too much bewildered and overwhelmed to reply. ‘Oh, Ailie, have you no child?’ she cried, at last finding no other words that would come. She had but asked the question, when the door opened, and Mr. John came suddenly in. When he saw Isabel he paused, and the same softened look which had come over his face in the steamer at the sight of her again gleamed over it. ‘You have come to see her?’ he said, and looked from the young widow in her deep mourning to his marble-white wife in her snowy cold dress with the strangest look of comparison. It seemed to the man as if the fate that might have been his and that which was really his thus stood together in visible contact. Isabel had grown more and more like her sister without knowing it. And now when her heart was so touched with sorrow, and wonder, and compassion, and all the depths of her nature moving in her eyes, it might have been Margaret herself who stood there, looking with infinite pity, striving vainly to understand the woman who was John Diarmid’s wife. ‘She is changed,’ he said, following with his eyes Isabel’s anxious look--‘sadly changed. It is because she will look at things only in one way. We were mistaken, I think. The world itself is changed, though so few can see it. It is not by converting a single soul here and there, but by moving nations that God’s work is to be done. Ailie, I am going away.’ ‘Going: where to?’ she said, with a momentary glance into his face; ‘to take the sword like them that shall perish by the sword? That’s no His command. I’m a poor creature--a miserable creature--He’s cast me off, and broken His word to me; but I’ll no forsake Him. No; there’s no word of power put into my mouth to speak to you, John Diarmid, not any word of power, but them that take the sword shall perish by the sword. He said it with His own lips.’ ‘Amen!’ said Mr. John; ‘it matters little. What is life to you or me that I should care to preserve it? As long as there is a race oppressed, so long is God’s word hindered in this world. I must go to my work--the time of patience and quiet is past.’ ‘Oh, Mr. John!’ cried Isabel, ‘you will never go and leave her alone like this?’ He turned to her with once more that softened look. ‘Perhaps I would not,’ he said, ‘if I could do her good. But no, Isabel. We have wrenched ourselves out of the common soil, she and I, and we cannot take root again. I must go to do what’s left me to do. We were fools, and took God at His word, without thinking that the paths must be made straight and the rough places smooth. I must go and work as I can--and she--will die.’ He said this so low that Isabel hoped she alone heard it; and she could not restrain a cry of wonder, and horror, and protestation.