'Oh, Angus!' Maggie held out her hand to him on the pier, and he held it as in a vice. 'It iss your own poat, then, Angus?'
'No; she iss not,' said Angus.
'No?'
'No! She iss yours, Maggie! I built her for ye—every inch of her grew under my own hand—and she's no a pad poat at all, though it iss me that says it——'
'Well, Angus——'
'Don't say another word, but go aboard,' said Angus, proceeding down the steep slippery steps to the loch, leading Maggie gallantly by the hand. Speedily the rope was unloosed, the white sail spread to the breeze, and the boat moved gracefully and rapidly, under a glorious sunset sky, out into the loch. Maggie sat holding the tiller silently while Angus adjusted the ropes. The loch was radiant from shore to shore in the rich evening light; quickly the white houses of the town were left in the distance; and hardly a movement but the delicious ripple of water cleft by the boat's bow, or the cry of a sea-gull sailing lazily overhead, disturbed the stillness. Here and there in the pools among the boulders in lonely parts of the shore, a heron stood silent as its own shadow and solitary as a hermit; from the grassy hollows by the beach a thin white mist rose, softening the green wooded slopes, and adding a sense of distance to the heathery ridges in the background, glorified by the red autumn sunset. Maggie was supremely happy. When the sail was fairly set, Angus came and stretched himself by her side.
'And ye think she iss a nice poat, and ye like her?' he said, looking into Maggie's face.
'It wass fery kind of ye to think of giving me such a present as this, Angus; but I cannot possibly take it.'
'Maggie,' said Angus, taking her disengaged hand in his, 'I hef long wanted to tell you something—indeed I hef, Maggie—not that I'm a goot hand at telling anything I want, but—all the time I wass building her, and that wass longer than ye might think, Maggie—I hef looked to this moment as a reward—when I would see you sitting there, looking that happy and that peautiful—yes, Maggie, peautiful, and pleased with my work—and proud am I to see ye so pleased wi' a trifle'——
'But it iss not a trifle,' said the maiden interrupting him; 'it wass a great undertaking! I nefer saw anything I liked half so much.'