d remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my
shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.

"What is wrong?" I asked, a good deal startled.

"It will be a great feesh," said the old man, returning to his oars; and
nothing more could I get out of him but strange glances and an ominous
nodding of the head. In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure
of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The water was still
and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay, exceeding deep.
For some time I could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if
something dark--a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow--followed
studiously in the track of the moving coble. And then I remembered one
of Rorie's superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in some great,
exterminating feud among the clans, a fish, the like of it unknown in
all our waters, followed for some years the passage of the ferryboat,
until no man dared to make the crossing.

"He will be waiting for the right man," said Rorie.

Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of
Aros. Outside and inside there were many changes. The garden was fenced
with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in
the kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from
the window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was
swinging from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of
linen and silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain
old kitchen that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the
stools, and the closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun
shone into, and the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the
mantelshelf and the three-cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells
instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare
wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole
adornment--poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven
with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of
rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that
country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by
these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of
anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was
baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first moment, in my
hea