"I wonder it was not a Highland one," her sister said, rather spitefully.
"Oh, I have a whole collection of Highland ones now, would you like to hear one? Would you, pappy?"
She went and fetched the book, and opened the piano.
"It is an old air that belonged to Scarba," she said, and then she sang, simply and pathetically enough, the somewhat stiff and cumbrous English translation of the Gaelic words. It was the song of the exiled Mary Macleod, who, sitting on the shores of "sea-worn Mull," looks abroad on the lonely islands of Scarba, and Islay, and Jura, and laments that she is far away from her own home.
"How do you like it, pappy?" she said, when she had finished. "It is a pity I do not know the Gaelic. They say that when the chief heard these verses repeated, he let the old woman go back to her own home."
One of the two listeners, at all events, did not seem to be particularly struck by the pathos of Mary Macleod's lament. She walked up to the piano.
"Where did you get that book, Gerty?" she said, in a firm voice.
"Where?" said the other, innocently. "In Manchester, I think it was, I bought it."
But before she had made the explanation, Miss Carry, convinced that this, too, had come from her enemy, had seized the book and turned to the title-page. Neither on title-page nor on fly-leaf, however, was there any inscription.
"Did you think it had come with the otter-skins, Carry?" the elder sister said, laughing; and the younger one retired, baffled and chagrined, but none the less resolved that before Gertrude White completely gave herself up to this blind infatuation for a savage country and for one of its worthless inhabitants, she would have to run the gauntlet of many a sharp word of warning and reproach.