“St. Elmo, where are you going?  Do allow yourself to be prevailed upon to wait and ride with us.”

Estelle’s tone was musical and coaxing as she approached her cousin and put one of her fingers through the button-hole of his coat.

“Not for all the kingdoms that Satan pointed out from the pinnacle of Mount Quarantina!  I have as insuperable an objection to constituting one of a trio as some superstitious people have to forming part of a dinner-party of thirteen.  Where am I going?  To that ‘Sea of Serenity’ which astronomers tell us is located in the left eye of the face known in common parlance as the man in the moon.  Where am I going?  To Western Ross-shire, to pitch my tent and smoke my cigar in peace, on the brink of that blessed Loch Maree, whereof Pennant wrote.”

He shook off Estelle’s touch, walked to the mantel-piece, and, taking a match from the china case, drew it across the heel of his boot.

“Where is Loch Maree?  I do not remember ever to have seen the name,” said Mrs. Murray, pushing aside her coffee-cup.

“Oh! pardon me, mother, if I decline to undertake your geographical education.  Ask that incipient Isotta Nogarole, sitting there at your right hand.  Doubtless she will find it a pleasing task to instruct you in Scottish topography, while I have an engagement that forces me most reluctantly and respectfully to decline the honor of enlightening you.  Confound these matches! they are all damp.”

Involuntarily Mrs. Murray’s eyes turned to Edna, who had not even glanced at St. Elmo since her entrance.  Now she looked up, and though she had not read Pennant, she remembered the lines written on the old Druidic well by an American poet.  Yielding to some inexplicable impulse, she slowly and gently repeated two verses: 

  “’Oh, restless heart and fevered brain! 
    Unquiet and unstable. 
   That holy well of Loch Maree
    Is more than idle fable! 
   The shadows of a humble will
    And contrite heart are o’er it: 
   Go read its legend—­“Trust in god”—­
    On Faith’s white stones before it!’”

CHAPTER XXI.

“While your decision is very painful to me, I shall not attempt to dissuade you from a resolution which I know has not been lightly or hastily taken.  But, ah, my child! what shall I do without you?”

Mr. Hammond’s eyes filled with tears as he looked at his pupil, and his hand trembled when he stroked her bowed head.

“I dread the separation from you and Mrs. Murray; but I know I ought to go; and I feel that when duty commands me to follow a path, lonely and dreary though it may seem, a light will be shed before my feet, and a staff will be put into my hands.  I have often wondered what the Etrurians intended to personify in their Dii Involuti, before whose awful decrees all other gods bowed.  Now I feel assured that the chief of the ‘Shrouded Gods’ is Duty, veiling her features with a silver-lined cloud, scorning to parley, but whose unbending figure signs our way—­an unerring pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night.  Mr. Hammond, I shall follow that stern finger till the clods on my coffin shut it from my sight.”