FROM "GREEN FIRE"
Be not troubled in the inward Hope. It lives in beauty, and the hand of God slowly wakens it year by year, and through the many ways of Sorrow. It is an Immortal, and its name is Joy.
The Herdsman
On the night when Alan Carmichael with his old servant and friend, Ian M'Ian, arrived in Balnaree ("Baile'-na-Righ"), the little village wherein was all that Borosay had to boast of in the way of civic life, he could not disguise from himself that he was regarded askance.
Rightly or wrongly, he took this to be resentment because of his having wed (alas, he recalled, wed and lost) the daughter of the man who had killed Ailean Carmichael in a duel. So possessed was he by this idea, that he did not remember how little likely the islanders were to know anything of him or his beyond the fact that Ailean MacAlasdair Rhona had died abroad.
The trouble became more than an imaginary one when, on the morrow, he tried to find a boat for the passage to Rona. But for the Frozen Hand, as the triple-peaked hill to the south of Balnaree was called, Rona would have been visible; nor was it, with a fair wind, more than an hour's sail distant.
Nevertheless, he could detect in every one to whom he spoke a strange reluctance. At last he asked an old man of his own surname why there was so much difficulty.
In the island way, Seumas Carmichael replied that the people on Elleray, the island adjacent to Rona, were unfriendly.