MacLeod called to Ishbel sharply, making no reply, and all three walked up to the cottage in heavy silence. The night, grown gusty and wet, seemed to have changed as suddenly and mysteriously as Ishbel's life.
At the door she paused and faced her lover; his silence galled and tormented her.
"Well!" she said, "well!"
If she had pleaded with him—been penitent, sorrowful! Alas! it was no penitent face which met his, and jealousy and wrath broke forth fiercely, sweeping love aside.
"Are you asking what I am thinking, Ishbel?" he cried, "of the lass who promised me, and who broke her word, and went out with Duncan MacLeod? Well, I am thinking chust nothing at all of her! I hef warned her that the boat was not safe, and of the squalls, and that it was not the thing for a lass like her to go so late; and she had promised, and yet she went! And this was the claymore brooch made of Iona pebbles I hef bought for you; and it can go there!" He flung the little packet remorselessly into the heather. "And as for yourself, I think nothing of you at all, and everything is over. And I am sailing for New Zealand with Mr. Campbell to-morrow. He asked me, and I said 'No,' but I will go now, and will walk into Portree this very night! Beannachd leibh (good-bye)."
He had turned away then, furiously. It had all passed as suddenly, swept up as unexpectedly as had the squall outside the Cave of Gold. Ishbel stood as if dazed, staring straight before her. A Highlander's rage is like a Highland storm; one bends before it instinctively. Ishbel did so now.
Rory did not look back. Duncan, in the doorway, saw him stride on to the road, through the little patch of oats before the door. He set his face towards the high road for Portree. In a very few moments the sound of his footsteps died away and the night swallowed him. That was all right, Duncan thought. New Zealand! Capital!
CHAPTER IV.
"There follows a mist, and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again!"
Ishbel might have thought of these words, if she had known them, on the morrow and on many morrows that followed. For Rory MacPhee was not the man to come back, or to speak lightly. He sailed with the agent to Glasgow—was believed to have started for New Zealand within the week. There, as far as his Skye friends were concerned, he vanished. They were the days of rare and slow communication, and Rory never wrote.