The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had grown still darker, and to the fisherman passing by the coast it must have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm, but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of water—the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the Fine Sand, and so forth—to measure the distance he had traversed; but he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was with a glance of something like surprise that he suddenly found himself overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in which was his home.
He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.
"Mr. Mackenzie," she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in the schools, "it wass Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help to you in the house."
The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the tears as if to disprove the fact.
"Ay, my good lass," he said, putting his hand gently on her head, "and it wass Sheila wrote to you?"
"Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost."
"It is a lonely house you will be going to," he said absently.
"But Miss Sheila said I wass—I wass to—" But here the young girl failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying: he bade her come up beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off again.
They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag, with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to take the wagonette and horses.
"And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?" said the man; "and it wass Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to Borva."