ing-room, that was
sometimes called a library, into something resembling the quaint
little drawing-room in Sheila's home. Mairi was bringing up a quantity
of heather gathered fresh from the rocks beside the White Water; she
was bringing up some peacocks' feathers, too, for the mantelpiece, and
two or three big shells; and, best of all, she was to put in her trunk
a real and veritable lump of peat, well dried and easy to light. Then
you must know that Sheila had already sketched out the meal that was
to be placed on the table so soon as the room had been done up in
Highland fashion and this peat lit so as to send its fragrant smoke
abroad. A large salmon was to make its appearance first of all. There
would be bottles of beer on the table; also one of those odd bottles
of Norwegian make, filled with whisky. And when Lavender went
with wonder into this small room, when he smelt the fragrant
peat-smoke--and every one knows how powerful the sense of smell is in
recalling bygone associations--when he saw the smoking salmon and the
bottled beer and the whisky, and when he suddenly found Mairi coming
into the room and saying to him, in her sweet Highland fashion, "And
are you ferry well, sir?"--would not his heart warm to the old
ways and kindly homeliness of the house in Borva, and would not some
glimpse of the happy and half-forgotten time that was now so sadly and
strangely remote cause him to break down that barrier between himself
and Sheila that this artificial life in the South had placed there?

So the child dreamed, and was happy in dreaming of it. Sometimes
she grew afraid of her project: she had not had much experience in
deception, and the mere concealment of Mairi's coming was a hard thing
to bear. But surely her husband would take this trick in good part.
It was only, after all, a joke. To put a little barbaric splendor of
decoration into the little smoking-room, to have a scent of peat-smoke
in the air, and to have a timid, sweet-voiced, pretty Highland girl
suddenly make her appearance, with an odor of the sea about her, as
it were, and a look of fresh breezes in the color of her cheeks,--what
mortal man could find fault with this innocent jest? Sheila's moments
of doubt were succeeded by long hours of joyous confidence, in which a
happy light shone on her face. She went through the house with a brisk
step; she sang to herself as she went; she was kinder than ever to
the small children who came into the square e