"Och," said Hugh, "I will be sitting inside with the lass I marry on the wet days."
"Yes, Hugh; but I would be liking to be out with him in the rain and laughing at it and loving it, because I would be with him."
"The Lord should have made you a man," said I, "for you would be kissing your lass on some hill-top with the rain in her brown face and clinging to her curls, Margaret."
"Brown face and curls," she cried. "I wonder. Would my lass have been like that, Hamish, like Belle, or with a look—like Mistress Helen maybe; but I would be loving the kissing anyway," said she.
And Helen Stockdale was often with us, whiles, to my thinking, a little skeich[1] with Hugh, as though maybe she would rouse the temper in him, for that she seemed to delight in, but never would she be telling us what her man should be like.
"Husban'," she would say, with a shrug of her shoulder, "il faut necessaire—one must, I think, be sensible; is it not so?—perrhaps in anozer world one may know from the beginning," and I often wondered if she had forgotten how something should leap up at her heart. She would talk to Margaret about her gowns, using terms that never before had I heard tell of, and sending as far as Edinburgh for her braws, which, I am thinking, was a waste of good money, but I kept my thumb on that. For the wedding was to come off at the back-end, and I would be hoping that the weather would keep up, and the harvest be well got, wedding or not.
And in these long summer evenings very often I would be taking one of the men with me and a net, and taking the boat from the beach we would go out with the splash-net, for I would be fond of the sport as well as of the daintiness of the eating in salmon trout. In the dusk we would be leaving, and whiles not coming in till it was two or three o'clock in the morning.
I am thinking that maybe long ago the folk on the island would be watching for an enemy landing from the water, for with the sea as calm as a mill-pond and just the loom of the land—maybe through a haze—the senses will become very alert, and any little noise without the boat a man will be hearing, and wondering about, as well as listening to the splash of a fish falling into the water after a gladsome leap, and the noise of splashing of the oars to frighten the salmon-trout into the meshes.
On an August evening we were in the little bay near the rock at the mouth of the wee burn that passes the great granite stone on the shore—for that is a namely place for trout. There was a bright golden gleam as the oars dipped, and a swirl of phosphor fire at the stern like little wandering stars, when I heard the noise of oars and the creak of thole-pins, and I turned to look, thinking maybe some other was at the fishing, but the boat was heading for the port at the Point—wrack-grown now, and only to be seen at low tide.
In the bay at anchor was a schooner, a low raking black schooner, with the gleam of her riding light reflecting a long way over the water toward the shore—a sign of rain, we say. In a little I heard a gruff voice in the English, for the words came to me plainly—