ed to be
weeping for it. If it had been clear cold weather, the fishers would
have been busy and happy, but it was gloomy, with black skies over the
black sea, and bitter north winds that lashed the waves into fury. The
open boats hardly dared to venture out, and the fish lay low, and were
shy of bait.

James Ruleson, generally accompanied by Cluny Macpherson, was out
every day that a boat could live on the sea, and Margot and Christine
often stood together at their door or window, and watched them with
anxious hearts, casting their lines in the lonely, leaden-colored sea.
The boat would be one minute on the ridge of the billow, the next
minute in the trough of the sea, with a wall of water on either hand
of them. And through all, and over all, the plaintive pipe of the
gulls and snipe, the creaking of the boat's cordage, the boom of the
breakers on the shore, the sense and the presence of danger.

And Christine knew that Cluny was in that danger for her sake. He had
told her on the day after the storm, as she sat sympathetically by his
side, that he was only waiting for her "yes or no." He said when she
gave him either one or the other, he would go to the Henderson
steamboats, in one case to work for their future happiness and home,
in the other to get beyond the power of her beauty, so that he might
forget her.

Forget her! Those two words kept Christine uncertain and unhappy. She
could not bear to think of Cluny's forgetting her. Cluny had been part
of all her nineteen years of life. Why must men be so one or the
other? she asked fretfully. Why force her to an uncertain decision?
Why was she so uncertain? Then she boldly faced the question and asked
herself--"Is Angus Ballister the reason?" Perhaps so, though she was
equally uncertain about Angus. She feared the almost insurmountable
difficulties between them. Caste, family, social usage and tradition,
physical deficiencies in education and in all the incidentals of
polite life, not to speak of what many would consider the greatest of
all shortcomings, her poverty. How could two lives so dissimilar as
Angus Ballister's and Christine Ruleson's become one?

She asked her mother this question one day, and Margot stopped beating
her oat cakes and answered, "Weel, there's a' kinds o' men, Christine,
and I'll no say it is a thing impossible; but I hae come to the
conclusion that in the case o' Angus and yoursel' you wouldna
compluter if you lived together a' the rest