t away
all the petty rules of life and humbled my pride in the dust. I
came because I could not stay, and now my one prayer is to find
him."

When I finished, he was silent for a long time. "My child," he
said, at last, "that you have greatly dared, I need not tell you.
But you know nothing of the pain, the misconstruction, the evil
report to which you have exposed yourself.

"These 'petty rules,' as you style the barriers which society has
established, are the safeguards of men and women in all their
relations, and these you have chosen to disregard. For this sin
against the social law you will suffer as surely as you would for
any infraction of that law which, because it is higher, we call
divine. You have only begun to realise it, because you have now
met with one of those disarrangements we name 'accident.' Your
plan, had it not been for this, would have carried you safely to
Louisbourg, where you were to have met and married M. de Maxwell;
but now your whole design is overthrown; Louisbourg is an
impossibility; you are going in an opposite direction. Again, up
to the present you have only met with your inferiors, to whom you
owed no explanation of your position, but now the first man you
meet happens to belong to your own class, and your isolation is no
longer possible. Being a woman of high courage and principle, you
have revealed to him your position in all its helplessness. But
are you prepared to do the like when you meet the next person to
whom an explanation is due? Can you again say, 'I am Margaret Nairn
come out to meet my lover'?"

"Oh, my father, my father!" I cried, with a bewildering shame at
my heart, and tears which I could not repress filling my eyes. "How
could I foresee this? Everything seemed so plain. I was no longer
a young girl, but a woman grown, with all a woman's strength of
love, when the death of Lady Jane left me without a soul to whom
I could turn, save him to whom I had given my first and only love.
I had been denied all its expression at the time I most longed for
it; I was deprived of its support when I most needed it, through
the mistaken sense of honour which drove into exile the gentlest
and most devoted of men. He was not one to push his own interest
at any time, and now that I am burdened with this undesired fortune,
his pride would fasten the door between us. It seemed to me--I
thought--that I could come to him and say, 'See, I bring back what
was yours by right.' Then, I