"Lord Stair," says he, "whether the gossips speak it or not is of little moment to me, but it's the truth before God! There was never another woman in the world like her, and from the moment I set eyes upon her I've loved her and wanted her for my wife. I love her more now since I have known what I missed; what I missed!" he repeated, his face working in a kind of agony and his eyes swimming with tears. "Oh," he continued, "what a wreck I have made of my life!"
"There's no need, by the same token," I cried, "to make a wreck of another's as well. Ye've a wife at home, a wife who loves you and whom you swore to love and honor. I have my daughter's reputation to think of, and the end of the whole matter is you'll just have to make your visits less frequent."
He had never come to me for sympathy before when he had not found it, and the sorrow in his face melted me more than was wise.
"Say once a fortnight, or such like," I said weakly. "Considering the relations between your father and me, visits so spaced might pass unnoticed. But I tell you honestly, Danvers Carmichael, when a man loves a woman whom he can't have, there is nothing for it but a good run and a far one. You'd better stay away altogether, laddie. It's the wisest course."
He left me with no further word, and I hoped that he had come to my way of thinking, when Satan himself took a hand in the affairs between Nancy and himself.
CHAPTER XXII
A STRANGE MEETING
Upon the day following that on which I denied Danvers the house, a letter came to us from a hamlet on the west coast, near Allan-lough, saying that Janet McGillavorich was sick unto death and desired that Nancy should come to her immediately.
It was a tedious journey, and while I sorrowed for the cause of it, I was glad to have her away from Stair for a while, and hastened her departure with Dickenson on the afternoon coach of the same day upon which the letter arrived. Even with this speed it was far into the second day before she came to the house in which Janet was lying; a house which seemed to have straggled back from the sea and stood lonesomely by itself in a small fenced garden having a gate-and-chain opening to the graveled path. It was a double-storied dwelling of pink brick, with small-paned windows and ivy creeping over it everywhere, even upon the wooden cap of the doorway, which hung over the two broad stone steps of the entrance.