A little impatient sigh burst from Margaret’s breast. ‘You stood by,’ she said, ‘once before, and took all the light and all the sweetness out of life. For once I will speak. I have been proud, but it’s not the time for pride now. O, John Diarmid, it is fit it should be your hand to call me back to life as you call it! I would never have upbraided you--no, not by a word. It was a thing settled you were never to come here. But now I will speak before I die.’ ‘Speak!’ he cried, going down upon his knees with a crouch of submission in his great frame. ‘Say what you will. I am vile to all and vilest to you. You are as God to me, Margaret, Margaret! But take the life I have won for you and never see me more.’ ‘The life you have won!’ said Margaret, with a tone which in any other voice would have been disdain. But her voice was like that of a dove, and had no notes of scorn in it. Yet soft as the approach to contempt was, the dying girl was remorseful of it. ‘I must not speak like this,’ she said; ‘and you must not speak to rouse the ill spirit in me, and me so near the pleasant heavens. Whisht! I canna think shame now, though Isabel is there to hear. John Diarmid, once I was as nigh loving you as now----’ ‘You’re nigh hating me!’ he said, with a great sob breaking his voice. ‘No; as I’m nigh being free of all the bonds of this world,’ said Margaret. ‘I was little more than a bairn; I was like Bell. They said you meant me harm; but I never thought you meant me harm----’ As the pathetic voice went on John Diarmid bowed his head lower and lower till at last he sank prostrate on the floor by the side of the sofa. It was her last words that brought him to this abject self-humiliation. He knew better than she did. A groan burst out of the man’s labouring breast. Even Isabel--sitting in a trance at her sister’s feet, roused up out of her stupor, her cheeks burning with a wild flush of jealousy and shame, half-wild that Margaret had descended from her saintly pedestal to avow the emotions of earth, and furious to think that any man had shared her heart--yet felt an unwilling movement of pity for the prostrate sinner. Margaret only continued without any change. ‘I never thought you meant me harm,’ she said, once more smiting with the awful rod of her innocence the man at her feet. ‘But when I heard what you had been, and what you had done, the light died out of the world. I am not blaming you. It was God that gave me my death, and not man; but from that hour I had no heart to live. Why should a woman strive to live, and fight against all the unseen powers, when this world’s so sore-defiled, and not a spot that she can set her foot on,--no one that she can trust? For me I had no heart to struggle more.’