The Dominie shook his head. ‘It may be nature,’ he said; ‘you should know better than me--but at three-and-twenty, to give up all your life to an infant, and never seek more in this world, is what I cannot comprehend. If her heart was crushed and dead it might be so, but that is not the case. I am not saying you are right or you are wrong, but it’s very strange to me.’
‘And for one thing, she must not know,’ said Miss Catherine, with an anxious look in her face; ‘neither you nor me will say a word to let her know?’
The Dominie turned away with a grim smile. ‘If that is all your certainty,’ he said, ‘there’s no such great difference between us.’ They exchanged a few more anxious words, standing together half-way up the ascent, and then Miss Catherine continued her walk towards the Glebe.
‘You have heard of something that vexes you,’ said Isabel, when, after all due court had been paid to the little princess, Miss Catherine sat wearily down and sank into a kind of abstraction; and then the old lady roused herself up with a guilty start.
‘Me!--no,’ said Miss Catherine; ‘what could I have that would vex me?--except just one thing, Isabel, my dear, if you will promise not to be frightened. There’s measles about. Jenny Spence’s second youngest--the one that was the baby----’
‘But he’s better,’ said Isabel, breathless. ‘It was last month he was ill.’
‘You can never say when they’re better,’ said Miss Catherine, solemnly; ‘and I heard they had it up at the toll on the Kilcranion road; and if one of the Chalmers’ bairns has not the whooping-cough, my ears are not to be trusted. But you must not be frightened. I was thinking if we were to take a week or two at the Bridge of Allan----’
‘Oh, my darling!’ Isabel was saying, with her lips on her baby’s cheek, whom she had seized out of its cradle in her panic. Miss Catherine’s guilty heart smote her, but she was not a woman to be diverted by a mere compunction from pursuing what she felt to be the safe way.
‘My dear, you promised me not to take any panic,’ she said; ‘there is no occasion. You take your walks on the braes, and not through the village; and Margaret has never been so far all her days as the toll-gate. But just to keep you easy, and her clear of all danger, I think you and me, Isabel, might go cannily away to the Bridge of Allan to-morrow. It would do us both good.’