"Well, you know now. I was nearly mad in Edinburgh, but I stuck to my principles. I wanted to be sure one way or the other. But Norman had no gratitude. He used your mother to help him against me——"
"That was Mrs. West, I think, who used her."
"Don't defend the fellow. It was both of them. They—and James sending for his wife—drove me into a corner. But I wasn't going to be swept off the board without a struggle. I meant from the beginning to fight for you, if I saw a gleam of interest in your eyes for me, and sometimes I thought I did see it. But thanks to Mrs. Bal MacDonald, they'd got you in their clutches, those two. It suddenly occurred to me when I lost Mrs. James, to go and get your grandmother—bring her by force if she wouldn't come. I knew she had a sneaking kindness for me, as a MacDonald man. There was a queer bond of sympathy between us, which we'd both felt when we met. All our worst faults are alike. I dashed off to Carlisle—quickest way, by train, and threw myself on the old lady's mercy—told her everything. She was a trump, though perhaps her desire to help was as much a wish to thwart her daughter-in-law as anything else. She was too rheumatic to come with me in the car. I suppose it was a wild scheme! But she herself suggested my going to London to invite the MacDonalds. She thought, if I offered inducements—and she was right. It was an inspiration on her part."
"But," I broke in, "isn't it glorious not to have chaperons at all?"
He didn't answer in words. Yet he made me understand in a far more emphatic and satisfactory way, that he agreed.
"You can imagine what I felt when you coolly went off from Ballachulish with Norman and his sister," Ian went on. "Then I did think it was all up—that I had been a fool for my hopes and my pains, till dear old Vedder hummed and hawed and apologized for taking a liberty, and mentioned that Salomon had boasted he was going to get his 'party' to Gretna Green in the shortest time on record. 'It's a plot!' I said to myself, as Mrs. James had warned me. And five minutes later Vedder and I and the Gray Dragon were off at a pace—well, I'm afraid we exceeded the legal limit most of the way; but the gods looked after us."
"And so did the heather moon!" I added.
Now we are at Dhrum, our own dear purple island set in a sea of gold; but first we went back to Carlisle and visited Grandma; and to please her and Ian, I consented to be married all over again, in church, with a special license and everything such as the conventional bride does, though it seemed treacherous to that happy moment at Gretna Green, which was like heaven after the valley of death. Grandma was wonderful to Ian, and very nearly nice to me. Not an unkind word did she say of Barbara, and she didn't even refer to my running away.
"You have had the sense to choose a real man, and the good fortune to win him. I'd hardly have thought it of you. A MacDonald too!" she remarked. And I almost loved her. Mrs. Muir made us a wedding cake, which she insisted on our taking away, in a large tin box: and when we left Hillard House, Heppie's nose was pinker than I ever saw it, which is saying a good deal.