And thus it happened that they were married, without paying any attention to the objections and protestations of Loch Diarmid. It was in the beginning of winter, when little Margaret was nearly a year old. Margaret’s father had been but a year and a half dead, which was the fact that chiefly shocked the parish. Stapylton took his bride to a pretty sea-side village further down the Clyde where the winter was mild, and where there were no associations to disturb the peace of their beginning. He bore with her in her distress at that temporary parting with her child--he bore with her anxieties about little Margaret and longings after her, in the little interval which he might have claimed as specially his own. He was thoughtful of her every wish, putting aside his own comfort (she thought) for hers. And Isabel found herself, all unawares, wrapt in that dream of happiness which most hearts entertain one time or other, and which so few realise. Out of her doubts she came into a sense of reality which was exquisite to her--and she who had loved her lover without believing in him, grew, with a blessed surprise and delight, which was like Heaven to her, to trust as much as she loved. The change was like that from night into the brightest day. She had reached the heights all radiant with the sun rising, after the valley of the shadow of death. ‘You have been a bride of brides,’ he said to her one day, when a few weeks of this dream had gone. ‘You have never asked me where we were to go, or what we were to do. I wish I could reward you for your trust, my love, and take you to a fine castle, and say you were queen----’ ‘It was not that,’ said Isabel, ‘don’t praise me too much. It was because I had so much in my mind I forgot. But, Horace, it is trust now.’ ‘And that is all I want,’ he said, ‘and we can settle together where we are to go.’ ‘But you have your own home?’ said Isabel. ‘I sold that; did I never tell you? I have no ties but you now,’ he said. ‘I meant to have gone to America--two years ago. Shall we go now? or shall we stay in your own country? or what are we to do?’ ‘I have been a fool,’ cried Isabel, ‘to think of nothing all this time. But you must have had plans of your own.’ ‘Yes, to disappear out of the world if you would not have me,’ he said; ‘but since I knew you would have me, everything else has gone out of my head.’ And then she clasped his arm with both her hands, and they walked on forgetting everything, even their plans. Oh, how different it was from the tender quiescence with which she had accepted the minister’s love! That had been but a dream and this was life. They went on together wandering along the beach which was lit up by all the glories of the sunset. She too happy to think of anything; he absorbed in her.