“Ferry well, Sheila, I will do that,” he said, knowing well why the girl wished it.
So father and daughter bade good-bye to each other; and Mackenzie went on shore with his face down, and said not a word to any of his friends on the quay, but got into the wagonette, and, lashing his horses, drove rapidly away. As he had shaken hands with Lavender, Lavender had said to him, “Well, we shall soon be back in Borva again to see you;” and the old man had merely tightened the grip of his hand as he left.
The roar of the steam-pipes ceased, the throb of the engines struck the water, and the great steamer steamed away from the quay and out of the plain of the harbor into a wide world of gray waves and wind and rain. There stood Mackenzie as they passed, the dark figure clearly seen against the pallid colors of the dismal day; and Sheila waved a handkerchief to him until Stornoway and its lighthouse and all the promontories and bays of the great island had faded into the white mists that lay along the horizon. And then, her arm fell to her side, and for a moment she stood bewildered, with a strange look in her eyes of grief, and almost of despair.
“Sheila, my darling, you must go below now,” said her companion; “you are almost dead with cold.”
She looked at him for a moment as though she had scarcely heard what he said. But his eyes were full of pity for her; he drew her closer to him, and put his arms around her, and then she hid her head in his bosom and sobbed there like a child.
PART V.
CHAPTER X.
FAIRY-LAND.
“WELCOME to London—!”
He was about to add “Sheila,” but suddenly stopped. The girl, who had hastily come forward to meet him with a glad look in her eyes and with both hands out-stretched, doubtless perceived the brief embarrassment of the moment, and was perhaps a little amused by it. But she took no notice of it; she merely advanced to him and caught both his hands, and said, “And are you very well?”
It was the old and familiar salutation, uttered in the same odd, gentle, insinuating fashion, and in the same low and sweet voice. Sheila’s stay in Oban and the few days she had already spent in London, had not taught her the difference between “very” and “ferry.”