‘Eh, I’m no wilful!’ said Isabel, thrilling in every vein with the determination to resist all advice that could be given to her. They were almost alone on the green glistening road which wound round the head of the Loch, and the water rippled up upon the pebbles, and flashed like a great mirror in the sunshine. The girl’s heart rose with the exhilaration of the brightness. ‘Your mother would take no advice,’ said Miss Catherine, ‘and she died at five-and-twenty, and left you, two poor babies, without a mother to guide you in the world.’ ‘But, oh, it was not her fault she died,’ cried Isabel. ‘Folk die that are happy too.’ ‘I’ll tell you what it was,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘not to put you against your father. He never pretended to more than he was. Duncan was aye honest, whatever else. But your mother saw qualities in him that no mortal could see. And when the hasty thing saw her idol broken, her heart broke too; and you’re like her--too like, Isabel.’ ‘For one thing at least, I’m wronging nobody; and why should you say all this to me?’ cried the girl all flushed and resentful, and yet struggling with her tears. ‘How can I tell what you might be tempted to do? Margaret Diarmid--that’s your mother--gave me her word she would take time and think, and the very next Sabbath she was cried in the kirk! Isabel, I said I would be cruel. Do you know, do you ever think, what’s coming upon you, bairn?’ Isabel made no answer--her resentment could not stand against this solemnity of tone. She raised her eyes to Miss Catherine as one who awaits the sentence of fate. ‘While you are running about, out and in, like a butterfly or a bird, and singing your songs, and working at your seam, and meeting strange folk upon the braes’--said Miss Catherine with emphasis. ‘I am not blaming you, even for the last. But all this time there’s coming a day when you will be left alone in the world, Isabel. Your bit cottage will still be yours--so to speak a home; but a home that’s empty and desolate, what is that? And none to lean on, none to advise you, none to be your guide--silence in the chambers, and cold on the hearth; and you no better than a bairn, used from your cradle to lean on her and turn to her: what will you do when you are alone in the world?’ ‘Oh, my Margaret!’ cried Isabel, drawing her hand from Catherine’s arm and bursting into a passion of tears. They were within the gate at Lochhead, and there was no one by to see the girl’s weeping, which was beyond control. She had been told of it again and again, and realised it to some degree, but never until now had brought her imagination to bear on the life that remained for herself after her sister was gone. Miss Catherine was softened by the violence of her emotion. She took Isabel into her arms and let fall a tear or two out of her old eyes, to mingle with those scorching drops that came wrung out of the other’s very heart.