"Why, Sheila!" he cried, jumping ashore before the gangway was shoved across, "whatever made you come to Stornoway on such a day?"
"And it is not much my coming to Stornoway if you will come all the way from England to the Lewis," said Sheila, looking up with her bright and glad eyes.
For six months he had been trying to recall the tones of her voice in looking at her picture, and had failed: now he fancied that she spoke more sweetly and musically than ever.
"Ay, ay," said Mackenzie when he had shaken hands with the young man, "it wass a piece of foolishness, her coming over to meet you in Styornoway; but the girl will be neither to hold nor to bind when she teks a foolishness into her head."
"Is this the character I hear of you, Sheila?" he said; and Mackenzie laughed at his daughter's embarrassment, and said she was a good lass for all that, and bundled both the young folks into the inn, where luncheon had been provided, with a blazing fire in the room, and a kettle of hot water steaming beside it.
When they got to Borva, Lavender began to see that Mackenzie had laid the most subtle plans for reconciling him to the hard weather of these northern winters; and the young man, nothing loath, fell into his ways, and was astonished at the amusement and interest that could be got out of a residence in this bleak island at such a season. Mackenzie discarded at once the feeble protections against cold and wet which his guest had brought with him. He gave him a pair of his own knickerbockers and enormous boots; he made him wear a frieze coat borrowed from Duncan; he insisted on his turning down the flap of a sealskin cap and tying the ends under his chin; and thus equipped they started on many a rare expedition round the coast. But on their first going out, Mackenzie, looking at him, said with some chagrin, "Will they wear gloves when they go shooting in your country?"
"Oh," said Lavender, "these are only a pair of old dogskins I use chiefly to keep my hands clean. You see I have cut out the trigger-finger. And they keep your hands from being numbed, you know, with the cold or the rain."
"There will be not much need of that after a little while," said Mackenzie; and indeed, after half an hour's tramping over snow and climbing over rocks, Lavender was well inclined to please the old man by tossing the gloves into the sea, for his hands were burning with heat.
Then the pleasant evenings after all the fatigues of the day were over, clothes changed, dinner despatched, and Sheila at the open piano in that warm little drawing-room, with its strange shells and fish and birds!
Love in thine eyes for ever plays;