d, Nan
reflected upon her next step. At a cast of her mind round all the
countryside she could think of no woman to turn to in this trouble, and
only with a woman could she share it. Her pride first, and then the fear
of her father's anger, left her only certain limits in which to operate.
Her pride would not let her even show curiosity in the identity of the
man who was to be her doom, nor confess to another that she did not know
his name. And the whole parish, if it was acquainted with her sale (as
now she deemed it), must be her enemy. Against any other outrage than
this she would have gone straight to her father. He that she loved and
caressed, on whose knees sometimes even yet she sat, would not be deaf
to any ordinary plea or protest of hers. She would need but to nestle in
his arms, and loose and tie the antique queue, and perhaps steal a
kiss willingly surrendered, and all would be well But this, all her
instincts, all her knowledge of her father told her, was no ordinary
decision of his. He had gone too far to draw back. The world knew it;
he feared to face her because for once to please her he could not cancel
what was done. There was no hope, she told herself, in that direction;
even if there was she would not have gone there, for the sordid horror
of this transaction put a gulf between them. Feverishly she turned over
her lowland letters, and there she found but records of easy heart and
gaiety; no sacrificing friends were offering themselves in the pages
she had mourned over in her moods of evening loneliness. And again she
brought her mind back to her own country, and sitting still dry-eyed,
with a burning skin, upon her bed, reviewed her relatives and friends,
weighing which would be most like to help her.

She almost laughed when she found she had reduced all at last to one
eligible--Elasaid, her old Skye nurse, and the mother of Black Duncan,
who was in what was called the last of the shealings, by the lochs of
Karnes. Many a time her mother had gone to the shealing a young matron
for motherly counsel, but Nan herself had never been there, though
Elasaid had come to Nan to nurse her when her mother died. In the
shealing, she felt sure, there was not only counsel, but concealment if
occasion demanded that.

But how was she to get there, lost as it was somewhere miles beyond the
corner of the Salachary hill, in the wild red moors between the two big
waters?

First she thought of Young Islay--first and