‘Make haste, Isabel!’ her husband shouted from the gig. He did not get down to help her into it, having already begun to glide out of the habits of a lover. And, after an awful moment of fear, she found herself seated by his side, without remark on his part. The baby moved and struggled under the cloak, but Stapylton took no notice. ‘What are you putting in now to delay us?’ he cried to Jean, who was placing the child’s little basket of ‘things’ behind. He was full of impatience to be off, and thought of nothing else for the moment. ‘It will be quite dark before we get home,’ he said, with almost a scowl at the delay. Jean stood and gazed after them as they darted from the door. ‘Oh, canny, canny, down the brae!’ she cried. She had not shed a tear over the parting, but her heart was heavy and sore. ‘She’ll repent it but once, and that will be a’ her life,’ she said to herself, as the black speck disappeared over the hill, ‘and it’s begun already. I ay said it, if that were ony satisfaction; but she never would listen to me.’ CHAPTER XLIII There was no moon, and the night grew speedily dark; and the road was no smooth, level highway, but a road up hill and down dale, as was natural to the country. Stapylton was so absorbed with its difficulties that he took no notice of the little traveller whose presence could not long be concealed. ‘What is it?’ he said, when little Margaret with a struggle made herself visible from under the cloak. ‘It is only the child,’ Isabel answered in the easiest tone she could attain to, though her very lips were trembling with excitement, and resolution, and alarm. What he said was lost in the night breeze which swept past them as they flew on against it. She thought he too had taken little Margaret’s presence for granted, and her heart seemed to go back with a leap to its natural place in her breast. But the fact was that Stapylton’s mind was at the moment too much occupied to have time to think of the child. When she looked up at him again, she saw that his brow was contracted, his lips firmly set together, a look of oppression and almost terror in his face.