‘Oh, Isabel, ye’re like a bairn with a new doll: let the poor infant take a grip of her life before you think of the time when she’ll be grown up. Ye’ll be for a man to her next.’
‘Oh, no, no man,’ said Isabel, with a little shiver; ‘what should my baby want with a man? She’ll be mine as I am hers--my only one, all I have in the world.’
‘You’re little better than two weans together,’ said Jean, looking pitifully down upon the mother and child and drying her eyes. Two-and-twenty, that was the girl’s age, with half a century of life still before her, all its stormier, harder part, the heat of the day and the burden. Could she go through the world as she thought, with no wakening of other feelings in her heart--altogether wrapt in this motherly virginal passion for her child? ‘She’ll be but a young woman still, when the bairn is twenty,’ said Jean to herself from the eminence of her own more advanced age. Such a thing was possible as that the heart thus thrown into one strain should never diverge, nor throb to any other touch. It was possible. But the woman in her experience sighed over it, and dried her eyes with her apron, and softly shook her head.
Thus life went on for months over Loch Diarmid. The minister’s dreadful end had fallen into gentle forgetfulness. Another minister was now the referee and head and butt of the parish, discussed in the smithy, criticised ‘at the doors.’ And he and his wife had been asked to dinner at the neighbouring country-houses, but not with so much success as had attended the _début_ of Isabel--and had called upon Mrs. Lothian, ‘the last minister’s widow,’ as the present female incumbent described her, and had not known very well what to make of the girl in her close cap, smiling over her baby--with her strange surroundings, and curious nondescript position. Mrs. Russell, the new minister’s wife, asked with a good deal of perplexity, ‘Is she a lady? I know she is a great friend of Miss Catherine. But everybody knows Miss Catherine is very odd. Dined at the Marquis’s in London, and went to the opera with Lady Mary! I can scarcely believe that. How could Lady Mary, an unmarried girl, take anybody to the opera? She does everything for that child herself--no nurse, nor anything like a nurse; indeed, I am not sure there was any servant at all. The woman I saw in the kitchen was her stepmother, I hear. Naturally it is not very pleasant for us to have the widow of Mr. Russell’s predecessor in such a position. Of course I would like to be kind to her if I could, but---- And then the way the people speak of her! For one that calls her Mrs. Lothian, there are half a dozen that say just Isabel, or Isabel at the Glebe, or the Captain’s Isabel, or some country name like that. I can tell you it’s very embarrassing for me.’