Mrs. Lorraine had been standing aside from the piano. Noticing that Sheila had played the introduction to the song twice over in an undetermined manner, she came forward a step or two and pretended to be looking at the music. Tears were running down Sheila’s face. Mrs. Lorraine put her hand on the girl’s shoulder, and sheltered her from observation, and said aloud: “You have it in a different key, have you not? Pray don’t sing it; sing something else. Do you know any of Gounod’s sacred songs? Let me see if we can find anything for you in this volume.”
They were a long time finding anything in that volume. When they did find it, behold! it was one of Mrs. Lorraine’s songs, and that young lady said if Mrs. Lavender would only allow herself to be superseded for a few minutes. And so Sheila walked, with her head down, to the conservatory, which was at the other end of the piano; and Mrs. Lorraine not only sung this French song, but sang every one of the verses; and at the end of it she had quite forgotten that Sheila had promised to sing.
“You are very sensitive,” she said to Sheila, coming into the conservatory.
“I am very stupid,” Sheila said with her face burning. “But it is a long time since I will see the Highlands – and Mr. Ingram was talking of the places I know – and – and – so – ”
“I understand well enough,” said Mrs. Lorraine tenderly, as if Sheila was a mere child in her hands. “But you must not get your eyes red. You have to sing some of those Highland songs for us, when the gentlemen come in. Come up to my room and I will make your eyes all right. Oh, do not be afraid! I shall not bring you down like Lady Leveret. Did you ever see anything like that woman’s face to-night? It reminds me of the window of an oil and color shop. I wonder she does not catch flies with her cheeks.”
So all the people, Sheila learned that night, were going away from London, and she and her husband would join in the general stampede of the very last dwellers in town. But Mairi? What was to become of her after that little plot had been played out? Sheila could not leave Mairi to see London by herself; she had been enjoying beforehand the delight of taking the young girl about and watching the wonder of her eyes. Nor could she fairly postpone Mairi’s visit, and Mairi was coming up in another couple of days.
On the morning on which the visitor from the far Hebrides was to make her appearance in London, Sheila felt conscious of a great hypocrisy in bidding good-bye to her husband. On some excuse or other she had had breakfast ordered early, and he found himself ready at half-past nine to go out for the day.
“Frank,” she said, “will you come in to lunch at two?”
“Why?” he asked; he did not often have luncheon at home.
“I will go into the Park with you in the afternoon if you like,” she said; all the scene had been diligently rehearsed on one side, before.
Lavender was a little surprised, but he was in an amiable mood.
“All right!” he said. “Have something with olives in it. Two, sharp.”
With that he went out, and Sheila, with a wild commotion at her heart, saw him walk away through the square. She was afraid Mairi might have arrived before he left. And, indeed, he had not gone above a few minutes, when a four-wheeler drove up, and an elderly man got out and waited for the timid-faced girl inside to alight. With rush like that of a startled deer, Sheila was down the stairs, along the hall and on the pavement; and it was: “Oh, Mairi; and have you come at last? And are you very well? And how are all the people in Borva? And Mr. M’Alpine, how are you? and will you come into the house?”
Certainly, that was a strange sight for a decorous London square – the mistress of a house, a young girl with bare head, coming out on the pavement to shake hands in a frantic fashion with a young maid-servant and an elderly man whose clothes had been pretty well tanned by sunlight and sea-water! And Sheila would herself help to carry Mairi’s luggage in. And she would take no denial from Mr. M’Alpine, whose luggage was also carried in. And she would herself pay the cabman, as strangers did not know about these things, Sheila’s knowledge being exhibited by her hastily giving the man five shillings for driving from Euston Station. And there was breakfast waiting for them both as soon as Mairi could get her face washed; and would Mr. M’Alpine have a glass of whisky after the night’s traveling? and it was very good whisky whatever, as it had come all the way from Stornoway. Mr. M’Alpine was nothing loath.
“And wass you pretty well, Miss Sheila?” said Mairi, looking timidly and hastily up, and forgetting altogether that Sheila had another name now. “It will be a great thing for me to go back to sa Lewis, and tell them I wass seeing you, and you wass looking so well. And I will be thinking I wass neffer coming to any one I knew any more; and it is a great fright I hef had since we came away from sa Lewis; and I wass thinking we would neffer find you among all sa people and so far away across sa sea and sa land. Eh – !” The girl stopped in astonishment. Her eyes had wandered up to a portrait on the walls; and here, in this very room, after she had traveled over all this great distance, apparently leaving behind her everything but the memory of her home, was Mr. Mackenzie himself, looking at her from under his shaggy eyebrows.
“You must have seen that picture in Borva, Mairi,” Sheila said. “Now come with me, like a good girl, and get yourself ready for breakfast. Do you know, Mairi, it does my heart good to hear you talk again? I don’t think I shall be able to let you go back to the Lewis.”
“But you hef changed ferry much in your way of speaking, Miss – Mrs. Lavender,” said Mairi, with an effort. “You will speak just like sa English now.”
“The English don’t say so,” replied Sheila, with a smile, leading the way up stairs.
Mr. M’Alpine had his business to attend to, but, being a sensible man, he took advantage of the profuse breakfast placed before him. Mairi was a little too frightened and nervous and happy to eat much, but Mr. M’Alpine was an old traveler, not to be put out by the mere meeting of two girls. He listened in a grave and complacent manner to the rapid questions and answers of Mairi and her hostess; but he himself was too busy to join in the conversation much. At the end of breakfast he accepted, after a little pressing, half a glass of whisky; and then, much comforted and in a thoroughly good humor with himself and the world, got his luggage out again and went on his way toward a certain inn in High Holborn.
“Ay, and where does the queen live, Miss Sheila?” said Mairi. She had been looking at the furniture in Sheila’s house, and wondering if the queen lived in a place still more beautiful than this.
“A long way from here.”
“And it iss no wonder,” said Mairi, “she will neffer hef been in sa Lewis. I wass neffer thinking the world wass so big, and it wass many a time since me and Mr. M’Alpine hef come away from Styornoway I wass thinking it wass too far for me effer to get back again. But it iss many a one will say to me, before I hef left the Lewis, that I wass not to come home unless you wass coming, too, and I wass to bring you back with me, Miss Sheila. And where is Bras, Miss Sheila?”
“You will see him by and by. He is out in the garden now.” She said “gyarden” without knowing it.
“And will he understand the Gaelic yet?”
“Oh, yes,” Sheila said. “And he is sure to remember you.”
There was no mistake about that. When Mairi went into the back garden the demonstrations of delight on the part of the great deerhound were as pronounced as his dignity and gravity would allow. And Mairi fairly fell upon his neck and kissed him, and addressed to him a hundred endearing phrases in Gaelic, every word of which it was quite obvious that the dog understood. London was already beginning to be less terrible to her. She had met and talked with Sheila. Here was Bras. A portrait of the King of Borva was hung up inside, and all around the rooms were articles which she had known in the North, before Sheila had married and brought them away into this strange land.
“You have never asked after my husband, Mairi,” said Sheila, thinking to confuse the girl.
But Mairi was not confused. Probably she had been fancying that Mr. Lavender was down at the shore, or had gone out fishing, or something of that sort, and would return soon enough. It was Sheila, not he, whom she was concerned about. Indeed, Mairi had caught up a little of that jealousy of Lavender which was rife among the Borva folks. They would speak no ill of Mr. Lavender. The young gentleman whom Miss Sheila had chosen had by that very fact a claim upon their respect. Mr. Mackenzie’s son-in-law was a person of importance. And yet in their secret hearts they bore a grudge against him. What right had he to come away up to the North and carry off the very pride of the island? Were English girls not good enough for him, that he must needs come up and take away Sheila Mackenzie, and keep her there in the South so that her friends and acquaintances saw no more of her? Before the marriage Mairi had a great liking and admiration for Mr. Lavender. She was so pleased to see Miss Sheila pleased that she approved of the young man, and thanking him in her heart for making her cousin and mistress so obviously happy. Perhaps, indeed, Mairi managed to fall in love with him a little bit herself, merely by force of example and through sympathy with Sheila; and she was rapidly forming very good opinions of the English race and their ways and their looks. But when Lavender took away Sheila from Borva a change came over Mairi’s sentiments. She gradually fell in with the current opinions of the island – that it was a great pity Sheila had not married young Mr. MacIntyre of Sutherland, or some one who would have allowed her to remain among her own people. Mairi began to think that the English, though they were handsome and good-natured, and free with their money, were on the whole a selfish race, inconsiderate and forgetful of promises. She began to dislike the English, and wished they would stay in their own country, and not interfere with other people.
“I hope he is very well,” said Mairi, dutifully; she could at least say that honestly.
“You will see him at two o’clock. He is coming in to luncheon; and he does not know you are here, and you are to be a great surprise to him, Mairi. And there is to be a greater surprise still; for we are going to make one of the rooms into the drawing-room at home; and you must open your boxes, and bring me down the heather and the peat, Mairi, and the two bottles; and then, you know, when the salmon is on the table, and the whisky and the beer, and Bras lying on the hearth-rug, and the peat-smoke all through the room, then you will come in and shake hands with him, and he will think he is in Borva again.”
Mairi was a little puzzled. She did not understand the intention of this strange thing. But she went and fetched the materials she had brought with her from Lewis, and Sheila and she set to work.
It was a pleasant enough occupation for this bright forenoon, and Sheila, as she had heard Mairi’s sweet Highland speech, and as she brought from all parts of the house the curiosities sent her from the Hebrides, would almost have fancied she was superintending a “cleaning” of that museum-like little drawing-room at Borva. Skins of foxes, seals and deer, stuffed eagles and strange fishes, masses of coral and wonderful carvings in wood brought from abroad, shells of every size from every clime – all these were brought together into Frank Lavender’s smoking-room. The ordinary ornaments of the mantelpiece gave way to fanciful arrangements of peacock’s feathers. Fresh-blown ling and the beautiful spikes of the bell-heather formed the staple of the decorations, and Mairi had brought enough to adorn an assembly room.
“That is like the Lewis people,” Sheila said, with a laugh; she had not been in as happy a mood for many a day. “I asked you to bring one peat, and of course you brought two. Tell the truth, Mairi: could you have forced yourself to bring one peat?”
“I wass thinking it was safer to bring sa two,” replied Mairi, blushing all over the fair and pretty face.
And, indeed, there being two peats, Sheila thought she might as well try an experiment with one. She crumbled down some pieces, put them on a plate, lit them, and placed the plate outside the open window, on the soil. Presently a new, sweet, half-forgotten fragrance came floating in, and Sheila almost forgot the success of the experiment in the half-delighted, half-sad reminiscences called up by the scent of the peat. Mairi failed to see how any one could willfully smoke a house – any one, that is to say, who did not save the smoke for his thatch. And who was so particular as Sheila had been about having the clothes come in from the washing dried so that they should not retain this very odor that seemed now to delight her?
At last the room was finished, and Sheila contemplated it with much satisfaction. The table was laid, and on the white cloth stood the bottles most familiar to Borva. The peat-smoke still lingered in the air; she could not have wished anything to be better.
Then she went off to look after the luncheon, and Mairi was permitted to go down and explore the mysteries of the kitchen. The servants were not accustomed to this interference and oversight, and might have resented it, only that Sheila had proved a very good mistress to them, and had shown, too, that she would have her own way when she wanted it. Suddenly, as Sheila was explaining to Mairi the use of some particular piece of mechanism, she heard a sound that made her heart jump. It was now but half-past one, and yet that was surely her husband’s foot in the hall. For a moment she was too bewildered to know what to do. She heard him go straight into the very room she had been decorating, the door of which she had left open. Then, as she went upstairs, with her heart still beating fast, the first thing that met her eyes was a tartan shawl belonging to Mairi that had been accidentally left in the passage. Her husband must have seen it.
“Sheila, what nonsense is this?” he said.
He was evidently in a hurry, and yet she could not answer; her heart was throbbing too quickly.
“Look here,” he said, “I wish you’d give up this grotto-making till to-morrow. Mrs. Kavanagh, Mrs. Lorraine and Lord Arthur Redmond are coming here to luncheon at two. I suppose you can get something decent for them. What is the matter? What is the meaning of all this?”
And then his eyes rested on the tartan shawl, which he had really not noticed before.
“Who is in the house?” he said. “Have you asked some washerwoman to lunch?”
Sheila managed at last to say, “It is Mairi come from Stornoway. I was thinking you would be surprised to see her when you came in.”
“And these preparations are for her?”
Sheila said nothing; there was that in the tone of her husband’s voice which was gradually bringing her to herself and giving her quite sufficient firmness.
“And now that this girl has come up, I suppose you mean to introduce her to all your friends; and I suppose you expect those people who are coming in half an hour to sit down at table with a kitchen-maid?”
“Mairi,” said Sheila, standing quite erect, but with her eyes cast down, “is my cousin.”
“Your cousin! Don’t be ridiculous, Sheila. You know very well that Mairi is nothing more or less than a scullery-maid; and I suppose you mean to take her out of the kitchen and introduce her to people, and expect her to sit down at table with them. Is not that so?” She did not answer, and he went on, impatiently: “Why was I not told that this girl was coming to stay at my house? Surely I have some right to know what guests you invite, that I may be able at least to ask my friends not to come near the house while they are in it.”
“That I did not tell you before – yes, that was a pity,” said Sheila, sadly and calmly. “But it will be no trouble to you. When Mrs. Lorraine comes up at two o’clock there will be luncheon for her and for her friends. She will not have to sit down with any of my relations or with me, for if they are not fit to meet her, I am not; and it is not any great matter that I do not meet her at two o’clock.”
There was no passion of any sort in the measured and sad voice, nor in the somewhat pale face and downcast eyes. Perhaps it was this composure that deceived Frank Lavender; at all events, he turned and walked out of the house, satisfied that he would not have to introduce this Highland cousin to his friends, and just as certain that Sheila would repent of her resolve and appear in the dining-room as usual.
Sheila went down stairs to the kitchen, where Mairi still stood awaiting her. She gave orders to one of the servants about having luncheon laid in the dining-room at two, and then she bade Mairi follow her up-stairs.
“Mairi,” she said, when they were alone, “I want you to put your things in your trunk at once – in five minutes, if you can; I shall be waiting for you.”
“Miss Sheila!” cried the girl, looking up to her friend’s face with a sudden fright seizing her heart, “what is the matter with you? You are going to die!”
“There is nothing the matter, Mairi. I am going away.”
She uttered the words placidly, but there was a pained look about the lips that could not be concealed, and her face, unknown to herself, had the whiteness of despair in it.
“Going away!” said Mairi, in a bewildered way. “Where are you going, Miss Sheila?”
“I will tell you by and by. Get your trunk ready, Mairi. You are keeping me waiting.”
Then she called for a servant, who was sent for a cab; and by the time the vehicle appeared Mairi was ready to get into it, and her trunk was put on the top. Then, clad in the rough blue dress she used to wear in Borva, and with no appearance of haste or fear in the calm and death-like face, Sheila came out from her husband’s house and found herself alone in the world. There were two little girls, the daughters of a neighbor, passing by at the time; she patted them on the head and bade them good-morning. Could she recollect, five minutes thereafter, having seen them? There was a strange and distant look in her eyes.
She got into the cab, and sat down by Mairi, and then took the girl’s hand. “I am sorry to take you away, Mairi,” she said; but she was apparently not thinking of Mairi, nor of the house she was leaving, nor yet of the vehicle in which she was so strangely placed. Was she thinking of a certain wild and wet day in the far Hebrides, when a young bride stood on the decks of a great vessel and saw the home of her childhood and the friends of her youth fade back into the desolate waste of the sea? Perhaps there may have been some unconscious influence in this picture to direct her movements at this moment, for of definite resolves she had none. When Mairi told her that the cabman wanted to know whither he was to drive, she merely answered: “Oh, yes, Mairi, we will go to the station;” and Mairi added, addressing the man: “It was the Euston Station.” Then they drove away.
“Are you going home?” said the young girl, looking up with a strange foreboding and sinking of the heart to the pale face and distant eyes – “are you going home, Miss Sheila?”
“Oh, yes, we are going home, Mairi,” was the answer she got, but the tone in which it was uttered filled her mind with doubt, and something like despair.
PART IX
CHAPTER XIX.
A NEW DAY BREAKS
WAS this, then, the end of the fair and beautiful romance that had sprung up and blossomed so hopefully in the remote and bleak island, amid the silence of the hills and moors and the wild twilights of the North, and set around about, as it were, by the cold sea-winds and the sound of the Atlantic waves? Who could have fancied, looking at those two young folks as they wandered about the shores of the island, as they sailed on the still moonlight nights through the channels of Loch Roag, or as they sang together of an evening in the little parlor of the house at Borvapost, that all the delight and wonder of life then apparently opening out before them was so soon and so suddenly to collapse, leaving them in outer darkness and despair? All their difficulties had been got over. From one side and from another they had received generous help, friendly advice, self-sacrifice, to start them on a path that seemed to be strewn with sweet-smelling flowers. And here was the end – a wretched girl, blinded and bewildered, flying from her husband’s house and seeking refuge in the great world of London, careless whither she went.
Whose was the fault? Which of them had been mistaken up there in the North, laying the way open for a bitter disappointment? Or had either of them failed to carry out that unwritten contract entered into in the halcyon period of courtship, by which young people promise to be and remain to each other all that they then appeared?
Lavender, at least, had no right to complain. If the real Sheila turned out to be something different from the Sheila of his fancy, he had been abundantly warned that such would be the case. He had even accepted it as probable, and said that as the Sheila whom he might come to know must doubtless be better than the Sheila whom he had imagined, there was little danger in store for either. He would love the true Sheila even better than the creature of his brain. Had he done so? He found beside him this proud and sensitive Highland girl, full of generous impulses that craved for the practical work of helping other people, longing, with the desire of a caged bird, for the free winds and light of heaven, the sight of hills and the sound of seas, and he could not understand why she could not conform to the usages of city life. He was disappointed that she did not do so. The imaginative Sheila, who was to appear as a wonderful sea-princess in London drawing-rooms, had disappeared now; and the real Sheila, who did not care to go with him into that society which he loved, or affected to love, he had not learned to know.
And had she been mistaken in her estimate of Frank Lavender’s character? At the very moment of her leaving her husband’s house, if she had been asked the question, she would have turned and proudly answered, “No!” She had been disappointed – so grievously disappointed that her heart seemed to be breaking over it – but the manner in which Frank Lavender had fallen away from all the promises he had given was due, not to himself, but to the influence of the society around him. Of that she was quite assured. He had shown himself careless, indifferent, inconsiderate to the verge of cruelty; but he was not, she had convinced herself, consciously cruel, nor yet selfish, nor radically bad-hearted in any way. In her opinion, at least, he was courageously sincere, to the verge of shocking people who mistook his frankness for impudence. He was recklessly generous: he would have given the coat off his back to a beggar, at the instigation of a sudden impulse, provided he could have got into a cab before any of his friends saw him. He had rare abilities, and at times wildly ambitious dreams, not of his own glorification, but of what he would do to celebrate the beauty and the graces of the princess whom he fancied he had married. It may seem hard of belief that this man, judging him by his actions at this time, could have had anything of thorough self-forgetfulness and manliness in his nature. But when things were at their very worst, when he appeared to the world as a self-indulgent idler, careless of a noble woman’s unbounded love; when his indifference, or worse, had actually driven from his house a young wife who had especial claims on his forbearance and consideration – there were two people who still believed in Frank Lavender. They were Sheila Mackenzie and Edward Ingram; and a man’s wife and his oldest friend generally know something about his real nature, its besetting temptations, its weakness, its strength and its possibilities.
Of course Ingram was speedily made aware of all that had happened. Lavender went home at the appointed hour to luncheon accompanied by his three acquaintances. He had met them accidentally in the forenoon, and as Mrs. Lorraine was most particular in her inquiries about Sheila, he thought he could not do better than ask her there and then with her mother and Lord Arthur, to have luncheon at two. What followed on his carrying the announcement to Sheila we know. He left the house, taking it for granted that there would be no trouble when he returned. Perhaps he reproached himself for having spoken so sharply, but Sheila was really very thoughtless in such matters. At two o’clock everything would be right. Sheila must see how it would be impossible to introduce a young Highland serving-maid to two fastidious ladies and the son of a great Conservative peer.
Lavender met his three friends once more, and walked up to the house with them, letting them in, indeed, with his own latch-key. Passing the dining-room, he saw that the table was laid there. This was well. Sheila had been reasonable.
They went up-stairs to the drawing-room. Sheila was not there. Lavender rang the bell, and bade the servant tell her mistress she was wanted.
“Mrs. Lavender has gone out, sir,” said the servant.
“Oh, indeed!” he said, taking the matter quite coolly. “When?”
“A quarter of an hour ago, sir. She went out with the – the young lady who came this morning.”
“Very well. Let me know when luncheon is ready.”
Lavender turned to his guests, feeling a little awkward, but appearing to treat the matter in a light and humorous way. He imagined that Sheila, resenting what he had said, had resolved to take Mairi away and find her lodgings elsewhere. Perhaps that might be done in time to let Sheila come back to receive his guests.
Sheila did not appear, however, and luncheon was announced.
“I suppose we may as well go down,” said Lavender, with a shrug of his shoulders. “It is impossible to say when she may come back. She is such a good-hearted creature that she would never think of herself or her own affairs in looking after this girl from Lewis.”
They went down stairs and took their places at the table.
“For my part,” said Mrs. Lorraine, “I think it is very unkind not to wait for poor Mrs. Lavender. She may come in dreadfully tired and hungry.”
“But that would not vex her so much as the notion that you had waited on her account,” said Sheila’s husband, with a smile; and Mrs. Lorraine was pleased to hear him sometimes speak in a kindly way of the Highland girl whom he had married.
Lavender’s guests were going somewhere after luncheon, and he had half-promised to go with them, Mrs. Lorraine stipulating that Sheila should be induced to come also. But when luncheon was over and Sheila had not appeared, he changed his intention. He would remain at home. He saw his three friends depart, and went into the study and lit a cigar.
How odd the place seemed. Sheila had left no instructions about the removal of those barbaric decorations she had placed in the chamber; and here around him seemed to be the walls of the old-fashioned little room at Borvapost, with its big shells, its peacocks’ feathers, its skins and stuffed fish, and masses of crimson bell-heather. Was there not, too, an odor of peat-smoke in the air? – and then his eyes caught sight of the plate that still stood on the windowsill, with the ashes of the burned peat on it.
“The odd child she is!” he thought, with a smile, “to go playing at grotto-making, and trying to fancy she was up in Lewis again! I suppose she would like to let her hair down again, and take off her shoes and stockings, and go wading along the sand in search of shell-fish.”
And then, somehow, his fancies went back to the old time when he had first seen and admired her wild ways, her fearless occupations by sea and shore, and the delight of active work that shone on her bright face and in her beautiful eyes. How lithe and handsome her figure used to be in that blue dress, when she stood in the middle of the boat, her head bent back, her arms upstretched and pulling at some rope or other, and all the fine color of exertion in the bloom of her cheeks! Then the pride with which she saw her little vessel cutting through the water! – how she tightened her lips with a joyous determination as the sheets were hauled close, and the gunwale of the small boat heeled over so that it almost touched the hissing and gurgling foam! – how she laughed at Duncan’s anxiety as she rounded some rocky point, and sent the boat spinning into the clear and smooth waters of the bay! Perhaps, after all, it was too bad to keep the poor child so long shut up in a city. She was evidently longing for a breath of sea air, and for some brief dash of that brisk, fearless life on the sea-coast that she used to love. It was a happy life, after all; and he had himself enjoyed it when his hands and face got browned by the sun, when he grew to wonder how any human being could wear black garments and drink foreign wines and smoke cigars at eighteenpence a piece, so long as frieze coats, whisky and a brier-root pipe were procurable. How one slept up in that remote island, after all the laughing and drinking and singing of the evening were over! How sharp was the monition of hunger when the keen sea air blew about your face on issuing out in the morning! and how fresh and cool and sweet was that early breeze, with the scent of Sheila’s flowers in it! Then the long, bright day at the river-side, with the black pools rippling in the wind, and in the silence of the rapid whistle of the silken line through the air, with now and then the “blob” of a big salmon rising to a fly further down the pool! Where was there any rest like the rest of the mid-day luncheon, when Duncan had put the big fish, wrapped in rushes, under the shadow of the nearest rock, when you sat down on the warm heather and lit your pipe, and began to inquire where you had been bitten on hands and neck by the ferocious “clegs” while you are too busy in playing a fifteen-pounder to care? Then, perhaps, as you were sitting there in the warm sunlight, with all the fresh scents of moorland around, you would hear a light footstep on the soft moss; and, turning around, here was Sheila herself, with a bright look in her pretty eyes, and a half blush on her cheek, and a friendly inquiry as to the way the fish had been behaving. Then the beautiful, strange, cool evenings on the shores of Loch Roag, with the wild, clear light still shining in the Northern heavens, and the sound of the waves getting to be lonely and distant; or, still later, out in Sheila’s boat, with the great yellow moon rising up over Suainabhal and Mealasabhal into a lambent vault of violet sky; a pathway of quivering gold lying across the Loch; a mild radiance glittering here and there on the spars of the small vessel, and out there the great Atlantic lying still and distant as in a dream. As he sat in this little room and thought of all these things, he grew to think he had not acted quite fairly to Sheila. She was so fond of that beautiful island life, and she had not even visited the Lewis since her marriage. She should go now. He would abandon the trip to the Tyrol, and as soon as arrangements could be made they would together start for the North, and some day find themselves going up the steep shore to Sheila’s home, with the old King of Borva standing in the porch of the house, and endeavoring to conceal his nervousness by swearing at Duncan’s method of carrying the luggage.