we
have here. The people get downhearted when they have their crops spoiled
by the long rain, and they cannot get their peats dried; and very often
the fishing turns out bad, and they have no money at all to carry on the
farm. But now you will see Borvabost."

Lavender had to confess that this wonderful princess would persist in
talking in a very matter-of-fact way. All the afternoon, while he was
weaving a luminous web of imagination around her, she was continually
cutting it asunder, and stepping forth as an authority on the growing of
some wretched plants or the means by which rain was to be excluded from
window-sills. And now, in this strange twilight, when she ought to have
been singing of the cruelties of the sea or listening to half-forgotten
legends of mermaids, she was engaged with the petty fortunes of men and
girls who were pleased to find themselves prospering in the Glasgow
police-force or educating themselves in a milliner's shop in Edinburgh.
She did not appear conscious that she was a princess. Indeed, she seemed
to have no consciousness of herself at all, and was altogether occupied
in giving him information about practical subjects in which he professed
a profound interest he certainly did not feel.

But even Sheila, when they had reached the loftiest part of their route,
and could see beneath them the island and the water surrounding it, was
struck by the exceeding beauty of the twilight; and as for her
companion, he remembered it many a time thereafter as if it were a dream
of the sea. Before them lay the Atlantic--a pale line of blue, still,
silent and remote. Overhead, the sky was of a clear, pale gold, with
heavy masses of violet cloud stretched across from north to south, and
thickening as they got near to the horizon. Down at their feet, near the
shore, a dusky line of huts and houses was scarcely visible; and over
these lay a pale blue film of peat-smoke that did not move in the still
air. Then they saw the bay into which the White Water runs, and they
could trace the yellow glimmer of the river stretching into the island
through a level valley of bog and morass. Far away, toward the east, lay
the bulk of the island--dark green undulations of moorland and pasture;
and there, in the darkness, the gable of one white house had caught the
clear light of the sky, and was gleaming westward like a star. But all
this was as nothing to the glory that began to shine in the south-east,
where the sky was