"Nine-thirty, and Jamie Forbes has come up from the hotel to drive me to Balquhidder. So good-bye, dear. Diarmid will look after you till I come back, and you may expect me about tea-time."
He did not ask any other question. His mind was now curiously detached from all immediate happenings, and he lived more and more in the past. Even his reading of the newspapers was coloured by the tendency to retrospect.
Isla got away with a considerable sense of relief, and when she mounted to the side of Jamie Forbes in the hotel dogcart her eyes even sparkled. There was now no horse of any kind, nor was there any carriage in the stableyard of Achree, though the old people, even Diarmid himself, could sadly recall the time when it had been full.
Isla was glad to be doing something. She had all the restlessness of an active nature that could not endure a policy of drift. They had been drifting so long with the ebb tide at Achree that she welcomed the crisis which made it necessary to take an immediate step.
She went ostensibly to ask the lawyer's advice, but her own mind was made up as to the best course to pursue. Her judgment was singularly clear, and she was not now in the smallest doubt as to the right--nay, the only--thing to be done in the circumstances.
At Balquhidder Station a few passengers were waiting for the Oban train, and, slightly to Isla's chagrin, directly she appeared on the platform a tall young man in a tweed suit and a covert coat came forward, with evident signs of satisfaction, to greet her.
"Good morning, Isla. This is an uncommon bit of luck. Are you going to town?"
"To Glasgow," she unwillingly admitted. "And you?"
"Glasgow too," he answered joyfully. "I was cursing my luck as I drove over the hill from Garrion, but if I had known, I should have driven with a lighter heart."
Isla scarcely smiled. She liked Neil Drummond very well as a friend, for they had known each other since their childhood. But in the last three years he had spoiled that friendship by periodically asking her to marry him. The expression in his eyes now indicated that very little provocation would make him ask her again on the spot, for he was very much in earnest. He was two years younger than Isla, and she always treated him like a young and very inexperienced brother, which incensed him a good deal.