a few days, however, during which there had been no return to their former
familiarity, it was with a fearful kind of relief that he learned she was
gone to pay a visit to a relation in the country. He did not care that she
had gone without taking leave of him, only wondered if she could have said
anything to incriminate him.

The session came to an end while she was still absent; he took a formal
leave of her aunt, and went home to Stonecross.

His father at once felt a wider division between them than before, and his
mother was now compelled, much against her will, to acknowledge to herself
its existence. At the same time he carried himself with less arrogance, and
seemed humbled rather than uplifted by his success.

During the year that followed, he made several visits to Edinburgh, and
before long received the presentation to a living in the gift of his
father's landlord, a certain duke who had always been friendly to the
well-to-do and unassuming tenant of one of his largest farms in the north.
But during none of these visits did he inquire or hear anything about Isy;
neither now, when, without blame he might have taken steps toward the
fulfilment of the promise which he had never ceased to regard as binding,
could he persuade himself that the right time had come for revealing it to
his parents: he knew it would be a great blow to his mother to learn that
he had so handicapped his future, and he feared the silent face of his
father at the announcement of it.

It is hardly necessary to say that he had made no attempt to establish any
correspondence with the poor girl. Indeed by this time he found himself not
unwilling to forget her, and cherished a hope that she had, if not
forgotten, at least dismissed from her mind all that had taken place