Ailie, with her young face gleaming white in the twilight, her nervous arm raised, her abstracted, humid eyes gazing into the vacant darkness, was a creature whose influence it was hard to be altogether indifferent to. Stapylton, though he was capable of laughter at this exhibition ten minutes after, was, at least, silenced for the moment. He looked at her with that curious stupidity, in which the ordinary mind loses its faculties at the sight of such incomprehensible poetic exaltation. But Isabel, already excited, gazed upon the young prophetess with the big tears still standing in her eyes, drawn by one emotion more closely within the reach of another than she had yet been. ‘I am not standing against Him! Oh, Ailie, dinna think it! Not for the world!’ she cried, dropping those two great tears; and Nature gave a little gasp and sob within her. To go forth with God’s servants on this austere road, or to wander with her love in the primrose paths. If there was a choice to be made, could anyone doubt for a moment which would be the right choice? But Isabel felt herself so different from this inspired creature, so different even from Margaret, so much slighter, younger, more trifling, fond of praise and admiration, and amusement; not able to give her mind to it. And yet she was the same age as Margaret, and very little younger than Ailie. ‘I am not like you,’ she added, with an exquisite sense of her own imperfection, which brought other tears from those same sources. And then the feminine impulse of excuse came upon her: ‘We were meaning nothing,’ she said, hurriedly and humbly. ‘I met Mr. Stapylton here on the hill. And it’s a bonnie night. You were walking yourself, Ailie. And I’m going home. It was no harm.’ ‘Oh, Isabel, ye never mind how you weary the Lord with your contradictions,’ said the prophetess. ‘I canna see your heart like Him; but do you think I canna see what’s moved ye? No the bonnie night, nor the bonnie hill, nor His presence that’s brooding ower a’ the world; but a lad that says he loves you, Isabel. There’s nae true love that’s no in Christ. If he’s true, let him come to the Lord with ye this moment, afore this blessed hour is gane. Eh, my heart’s troubled,’ she cried, suddenly raising her arms; ‘my heart’s sore for you. If he comes not now, when the Lord is holding wide the door, it’s that he’ll never come; and then there is nothing for you but tribulation and sorrow, and lamentation and woe!’ Her voice sank as suddenly as it had risen. She pressed her hands upon her eyes, with what seemed, to the terrified Isabel, the gesture of one who shuts out something terrible from her vision. ‘It is the spirit that’s upon her,’ Isabel murmured to herself, shivering. ‘Oh, Ailie, dinna lay any curse on us, that never did you harm!’