girl more to be envied?
Handsomer? Richer? More gifted? Think, too, of the advantages that I've
had with Father Michel and Hugh Pitcairn to teach me! Think of the stir
my songs have made! And at the end what am I?

"Ah!" she went on, "take any woman, _any_ woman, educate her in the
highest knowledges known, keep her with men, and far from her own sex,
and at the end of it, what is she? A creature who wants the man she
loves and babies of her own," and at these last words she broke into
another storm of weeping which drove me wild with dread.

"Nancy," I cried, "think of your recent illness. For my sake try to
control yourself more. There is the poor head to be thought of always."

"It's been this head of mine that's been my undoing, Jock," she
answered, between her sobs. "All the trouble has come from that."

MacColl was off for Dr. McMurtrie before daybreak, and I sat holding
Nancy's hand waiting for his coming, with Pitcairn's ancient statement
going round and round clatter-mill in my brain:

"Ye can't educate a woman as ye can a man. With six thousand years of
heredity, the physiology of the female sex, and the Lord himself
against you, I'm thinking it wise for you to have your daughter reared
like other women, to fulfil woman's great end," and pondering over the
fact that the great lawyer and Nancy herself seemed to have come to
exactly the same conclusion.

I was alarmed by her pallor and exhaustion, but McMurtrie assured me
that a sleeping potion would set her far along the road to recovery;
and at breakfast, after Nancy had fallen into an induced sleep, unknown
to himself he gave me what I felt to be the key to the whole bitter
suffering she was enduring, suffering, I feared, which came from a love
learned too late.

"Your friend Sandy will be a grandfather soon, I see," said the old
doctor, beaming at me over his glasses as he drank his tea.

This was the beginning of a troubled time for all of us, and one which
a partial biographer of Danvers Carmichael would like to slur over or
leave untold entirely, for it seemed that neither reason nor
self-respect could do anything with him in his thirst for Nancy's
society. As soon as she was about again he was over at Stair, the
excuse being some presents which he had brought us from the strange
lands he had been visiting; his constant thought of her, even upon his
bridal tour, being plainly shown by these: a ring from Venice, of
wrought gold with aquamarines,