acks of the
horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising
and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy
lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of
water--the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the
Fine Sand, and so forth--to measure the distance he had traversed; but
he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was
with a glance of something like surprise that he suddenly found himself
overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in
which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At
the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl,
fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

"Mr. Mackenzie," she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation
that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in
the schools, "it wass Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she
said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help
to you in the house."

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the
tears as if to disprove the fact.

"Ay, my good lass," he said, putting his hand gently on her head, "and
it wass Sheila wrote to you?"

"Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost."

"It is a lonely house you will be going to," he said absently.

"But Miss Sheila said I wass--I wass to--" But here the young girl
failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go
down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette
seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying: he bade her come up
beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some
message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off
again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag,
with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped
on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to
take the wagonette and horses.

"And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?" said the man; "and it
wass Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to
Borva."

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and
the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore,
and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a
man considerably