‘This is the last time I will speak. The steamer leaves Kilcranion at three; I will be here waiting for you at two o’clock. I will take every precaution, and make every arrangement. Think it over, Isabel, you never made such an important decision. If you do not come to me at two to-morrow we may never meet more in our lives.’
She stopped and stood gazing at him as he came to this conclusion. For his part he had grown pale and breathless with excitement. He looked at her menacingly from beneath his lowering brows. ‘Never in our lives if not to-morrow!’ he repeated, looking intently in her eyes as if to look her down.
But Isabel was roused, too; she met his eyes without flinching, though every particle of colour had left her face.
‘You threaten me!’ she said, with unconscious scorn. ‘If it was me, I would go to the end of the earth for one I loved—not frown at her, and break her heart to do a thing that’s impossible. Oh, how could you ask me to do it? It will have to be never—never! if that is your last word——’
And even then poor Isabel’s maidenly soul was so faithful, so incapable of believing he could mean the cruel things he said, that her eyes grew wistful and woeful looking at him, for one final moment appealing still.
‘I will wait for you all the same,’ he said, with a half-laugh. ‘When you think it all over, you’ll change your mind. At two o’clock I will be here.’
For yet one more moment they stood confronting each other; he with a smile of affected calmness; she with a gaze that gradually clouded into despair. Then she turned with a little wave of her hand, and left him. He did not attempt to follow. He stood on the same spot watching her as she wound her way through the heather. Once or twice he moved a step in the same direction as if to go after her, but immediately stopped himself.
‘If I give in now all’s lost,’ he said to himself, trying to force his lips into a cheerless whistle. ‘She’ll have thought better of it before to-morrow,’ he said unconsciously aloud. After all, a sister is only a sister, a sort of secondary relationship in life. What girl (he thought) would lose a husband for the sake of a dead woman who could interfere with her comfort no more? ‘She’ll think better of it,’ he repeated to himself in his heart.
CHAPTER XVIII
Isabel went softly down the hill in a concentrated calm, such as only excitement knows. There was a vague, indescribable force in her; a flush of hysterical strength, an exaltation of feeling and bearing and step. Jamie had been sent out by his mother to look for her, and met her some hundred yards from the cottage, stopped short, amazed by her looks, ‘Oh! Isabel, what is it?’ he cried; but Isabel swept past him unaware of his presence. She went in through the parlour to the innermost retirement of her own room, and there sat down to think; but she was not capable of thought. She sat down with her bonnet and shawl still on by the side of the bed on which her sister had lain in the last silence of death, and leaned her head against the chill pillow to still and calm herself.