After a time Isla went back very quietly and soberly to the house to astonish her relatives by another vagary.
"I am ready to go to Barras to-morrow, Aunt Jean, and to stop as long as you like."
"And will Neil come with us or after us, my dear?" asked Lady Mackinnon, her shrewd eyes lighting up cheerfully. "You know there is room and to spare in the house."
"No, Aunt Jean, Neil will not come. I am not going to marry him now--nor any man," she answered.
And she sped away to make her preparations for the journey which, an hour before, she thought nothing on earth would induce her to undertake.
A strange peace seemed to brood that night upon the Lodge of Creagh and the Moor of Silence. Sleep was very far from Isla's eyes as she sat before her uncurtained window, looking out upon the limitless space on which the white moonlight lay.
The end of all things had come, so far as human judgment could determine. The last Mackinnon of Achree slept with his forefathers, and she, a poor weak woman of no account, was left to tie up the broken threads. Her thoughts of Malcolm were very tender, nor had she any misgiving, thinking of where he might be.
"It is better to fall into the hands of the living God than into the hands of men," she might have said, had she been called upon for an expression of her state of mind.
Upon her knees, with her chin upon the sill of the open window and her eyes upon the great silence where the moonlight lay, she asked to be forgiven for her hardness of heart, for her swift condemnation, for her poor, puny, disastrous efforts to set the world right. She knew now, in that moment of clear vision, that no man or woman is called to so great a task, but that what is asked of us all is merely and only the simple performance of each day's homely duty, by the doing of which, nevertheless, the whole fabric of human life and human achievement is ennobled and perfected.
With her chin resting upon the window-sill and her eyes, uplifted to the kindly, but impenetrable skies, Isla prayed. And then, leaving herself and her destiny for ever in the Hand which alone is capable of unravelling and setting in fair order human affairs, she crept to her bed to sleep off the overwhelming fatigue of the day.