When he thus delivered himself of his exceeding bitter cry, this woman too, like his mother, answered him with a shining face, with eyes swimming in tears, and brilliant with celestial certainty. She put out her hands to him without a moment's hesitation, and grasped his and smiled.
"Oh, that is all provided for!" she said. "Yes, He knew! It is all ready for you—waiting—waiting. Don't you know our Lord stands at the door and knocks, till you are ready to let Him in? And now you are ready. There is nothing more."
He received the soft hands within his with feelings indescribable, at such a height of emotion that all the lesser shades and degrees were lost. He twined her fingers among his own, clasping them with an entire appropriation.
"Oona," he said, "the house is yours, and all in it. Open the door to your Lord, whom I am not worthy to come near—and to everything that is good. It is yours to do it. Open the door!"
They had forgotten Hamish who sat behind, pulling his long, even strokes, with his anxious shaggy countenance fixed like that of a faithful dog upon his mistress, whom he had to guard. He saw the two heads draw very close together, and the murmur of the voices.
"What will she be saying to him? She will be winning him out of yon transport. She will be puttin' peace in his hairt. She has a voice that would wile the bird from the tree," said Hamish to himself. "But oh hon!—my bonnie Miss Oona," Hamish cried aloud.
This disturbed them and made them conscious of the spectator, who was there with them, separate from all the world. Oona, with a woman's readiness to throw her veil over and hide from the eye of day all that is too sacred for the vulgar gaze, raised her face, still quivering with tender and holy passion.
"Why do you say 'oh hon?' There is nothing to say 'oh hon' for, Hamish. No, no; but the other way."
Hamish looked across the young lord, whose head was bowed down still over Oona's hands, which he held. The boatman gave him a glance in which there was doubt and trouble, and then raised his shaggy eyebrows, and addressed a look of entreaty and warning to the fair inspired face that hovered over Walter like a protecting angel. "Ye will not be doing the like of that," he said, "without thought?"
And all the time the boat swept on over the reflections in the water, by the low shore of the Isle of Rest where death had easy landing, away among the feathery islets, all tufted brown and crimson to the water's edge, where nothing but the wild life of the woods could find footing:—nothing near them but the one anxious, humble retainer, watching over Oona, for whom no one in heaven or earth, save himself, entertained any fear. He quickened those long strokes in the excitement of his soul, but neither did Walter take any account of where he was going, nor Oona awake out of the excitement of the moment to think of the descent into common life which was so near. Hamish only, having the entire conduct of them, hastened their progress back to ordinary existence—if perhaps there might be some aid of reason and common judgment (as he said to himself) there, to see that the man was in his right senses before Oona should be bound for life.