“Papa,” she said, “to-morrow I want you to take me to Jura.”
“To Jura, Sheila? You cannot go to Jura. You cannot leave the baby with Mairi, Sheila.”
“I will take him with me,” she said.
“Oh, it is not possible at all, Sheila. But I will go to Jura—oh yes, I will go to Jura. Indeed, I was thinking last night that I would go to Jura.”
“Oh no, you must not go,” she cried. “You would speak harshly—and he is very proud—and we should never see each other again. Papa, I know you will do this for me—you will let me go.”
“It is foolish of you, Sheila,” her father said, “to think that I do not know how to arrange such a thing without making a quarrel of it. But you will see all about it in the morning. Just now you will lie down, like a good lass, and go to sleep. So good-night, Sheila, and do not think of it any more till the morning.”
She thought of it all through the night, however. She thought of her sailing away down through the cold wintry seas to search that lonely coast. Would the gray dawn break with snow, or would the kindly heavens lend her some fair sunlight as she set forth on her lonely quest? And all the night through she accused herself of being hard of heart, and blamed herself, indeed, for all that had happened in the by-gone time. Just as the day was coming in she fell asleep, and she dreamed that she went to the angel whom she had seen before, and knelt down at his feet and repeated in some vague way the promises she had made on her marriage morning. With her head bent down she said that she would live and die a true wife if only another chance were given her. The angel answered nothing, but he smiled with his sad eyes and put his hand for a moment on her head, and then disappeared. When she awoke Mairi was in the room silently stealing away the child, and the white daylight was clear in the windows.
She dressed with trembling hands, and yet there was a faint suffused sense of joy in her heart. She wondered if her father would keep to his promise of the night before, or whether it had been made to get her to rest. In any case she knew that he could not refuse her much; and had not he himself said that he had intended going away down to Jura?
“Sheila, you are not looking well this morning,” her father said; “it is foolish for you to lie awake and think of such things. And as for what you were saying about Jura, how can you go to Jura? We hef no boat big enough for that. I could go—oh yes, I could go—but the boat I would get at Stornoway you would not get in at all, Sheila; and as for the baby—”
“But, then, papa,” she said, “did not the gentleman who was here last night say that they were going back by Jura? And it is a big yacht, and he has only two friends on board. He might take us down.”