I was in a storm of roaring emotions, yet her next words startled me. “It's Isobel Fortune of the Kirkillstane,” she said, trying hard to smile with a wan face in the candle light. “It _was_--poor dear! Am I not in torment when I think that she must know it?” “I thought it was that that ailed ye, Paul,” said she, as if she were relieved. “Look; I got this a little ago on the bleaching-green--this scrap of paper in your write and her name upon it. Maybe I should not have read it.” And she handed me part of that ardent ballad I had torn less than an hour ago. I held it in the flame of her candle till it was gone, our hands all trembling, and “That's the end appointed for Paul Greig,” said I. “Oh, Paul, Paul, it cannot be so unco'!” she cried in terror, and clutched me at the arm. “It is--it is the worst.” “And yet--and yet--you're my son, Paul. Tell me.” She looked so like a reed in the winter wind, so frail and little and shivering in my room, that I dared not tell her there and then. I said it was better that both father and she should hear my tale together, and we went into the room where already he was bedded but not asleep. He sat up staring at our entry, a night-cowl tassel dangling on his brow. “There's a man dead--” I began, when he checked me with a shout. “Stop, stop!” he cried, and put my mother in a chair. “I have heard the tale before with my brother Andy, and the end was not for women's ears.” “I must know, Quentin,” said his wife, blanched to the lip but determined, and then he put his arm about her waist. It seemed like a second murder to wrench those tender hearts that loved me, but the thing was bound to do. I poured out my tale at one breath and in one sentence, and when it ended my mother was in her swound. “Oh, Paul!” cried the poor man, his face like a clout; “black was the day she gave you birth!” CHAPTER VII QUENTIN GREIG LOSES A SON, AND I SET OUT WITH A HORSE AS ALL MY FORTUNE He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me--schemes of concealment and disguise, of surrender even--but the last to be dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?