“That I will.”

A silence of some moments followed.  Margaret resumed: 

“I am afraid you will laugh at my foolish fancies, Duncan; but in thinking over all these things, as you may suppose I often do, lying awake in my lonely bed, the notion sometimes comes to me:  What if my Duncan be the youth whom his wicked brother hurled into the ravine, come again in a new body, to live out his life, cut short by his brother’s hatred?  If so, his persecution of you, and of your mother for your sake, is easy to understand.  And if so, you will never be able to rest till you find your fere, wherever she may have been born on the face of the earth.  For born she must be, long ere now, for you to find.  I misdoubt me much, however, if you will find her without great conflict and suffering between, for the Powers of Darkness will be against you; though I have good hope that you will overcome at last.  You must forgive the fancies of a foolish old woman, my dear.”

I will not try to describe the strange feelings, almost sensations, that arose in me while listening to these extraordinary utterances, lest it should be supposed I was ready to believe all that Margaret narrated or concluded.  I could not help doubting her sanity; but no more could I help feeling peculiarly moved by her narrative.

Few more words were spoken on either side, but, after receiving renewed exhortations to carefulness on the way home, I said good-bye to dear old nurse, considerably comforted, I must confess, that I was not doomed to be a tutor all my days; for I never questioned the truth of that vision and its consequent prophecy.

I went out into the midst of the storm, into the alternating throbs of blackness and radiance; now the possessor of no more room than what my body filled, and now isolated in world-wide space.  And the thunder seemed to follow me, bellowing after me as I went.

Absorbed in the story I had heard, I took my way, as I thought, homewards.  The whole country was well known to me.  I should have said, before that night, that I could have gone home blindfold.  Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell, for the hardest thing to understand, in intellectual as well as moral mistakes, is how we came to go wrong.  But after wandering for some time, plunged in meditation, and with no warning whatever of the presence of inimical powers, a brilliant lightning-flash showed me that at least I was not near home.  The light was prolonged for a second or two by a slight electric pulsation; and by that I distinguished a wide space of blackness on the ground in front of me.  Once more wrapt in the folds of a thick darkness, I dared not move.  Suddenly it occurred to me what the blackness was, and whither I had wandered.  It was a huge quarry, of great depth, long disused, and half filled with water.  I knew the place perfectly.  A few more steps would have carried me over the brink.