’_Drinking himself to death, in the lowest of low company:_’ black night seemed to have fallen upon her, and a wild bewilderment, and a crushing sense of hopelessness that shut out for ever those fair visions of the future. She did not stay to ask whether this might not be a woman’s exaggeration or the mere gossip of a straitlaced set; the blow had fallen too suddenly to let her reason about it; she only knew that the very pride of her life, the secret hope of her heart, had been in a moment extinguished. And Ronald—Ronald that was ever the smartest and handsomest of them all—the gayest and most audacious, the very king of all the company whithersoever he went—was it this same Ronald who had in so short a time become a bleared and besotted drunkard, shunning the public ways, hiding in ignoble haunts, with the basest of creatures for his only friends? And she—that had been so proud of him—that had been so assured of his future—nay, that had given him the love of her life, and had sworn to herself that, whether he ever came to claim it or no, no other man should take his place in her heart—she it was who had become possessed of this dreadful secret, while all the others were still imagining that Ronald was as the Ronald of yore. She dared not go back to Inver-Mudal—not yet, at least. She went away along the highway; and then left that for a path that led alongside a small burn; and by and by, when she came to a place where she was screened from all observation by steep and wooded banks, she sat down there with some kind of vague notion that she ought more carefully to read this terrible news; but presently she had flung herself, face downward, on the heather, in an utter agony of grief, and there she lay and sobbed and cried, with her head buried in her hands. ’_Ronald! Ronald!_’ her heart seemed to call aloud in its despair; but how was any appeal to be carried to him—away to Glasgow town? And was this the end? Was he never coming back? The proud young life that promised so fair to be sucked under and whirled away in a black current; and as for her—for her the memory of a few happy days spent on Mudal’s banks, and years and years of lonely thinking over what might have been.