A spasm of pain crossed the speaker's face. She stopped, and gasped for breath. When at last she resumed, it was clear she considered as settled the matter on which she had spoken.
"Alan, I am so unwell that I must be very brief. And now listen. You are twenty-five to-day. Such small fortune as is yours comes now into your possession. It has been administered for you by a firm of lawyers in Edinburgh. See, here is the address. Can you read it? Yes?... Well, keep the slip. This fortune is not much. To many, possibly to you, it may not seem enough to provide more than the bare necessities of life, not enough for its needs. Nevertheless, it is your own, and you will be glad. It will, at least, suffice to keep you free from need if ever you fulfil your great wish to go back to the land of your fathers, to your own place."
"That is still my wish and my hope."
"So be it! You will have also an old sea castle, not much more than a keep, on a remote island. It will at any rate be your own. It is on an island where few people are; a wild and precipitous isle far out in the Atlantic at the extreme of the Southern Hebrides."
"Is it called Rona?" Alan interrupted eagerly.
Without noticing, or heeding, his eagerness, she assented.
"Yes, it is called Rona. Near it are the isles of Mingulay and Borosay. These three islands were once populous, and it was there that for hundreds of years your father's clan, of which he was hereditary chief, lived and prospered. After the evil days, the days when the young King was hunted in the west as though a royal head were the world's desire, and when our brave kinswoman, Flora Macdonald, proved that women as well as men could dare all for a good cause—after those evil days the people melted away. Soon the last remaining handful were upon Borosay; and there, too, till the great fire that swept the island a score of years ago, stood the castle of my ancestors, the Macdonalds of Borosay.
"My father was a man well known in his day. The name of Sir Kenneth Macdonald was as familiar in London as in Edinburgh; and in Paris he was known to all the military and diplomatic world, for in his youth he had served in the French army with distinction, and held the honorary rank of general.
"Not long before my mother's death he came back to our lonely home in Borosay, bringing with him a kinsman of another surname, who owned the old castle of Rona on the Isle of the Sea-caves, as Rona is often called by the people of the Hebrides. Also there came with him a young French officer of high rank. After a time I was asked to marry this man. I did not love him, did not even care for him, and I refused. In truth ... already, though unknowingly, I loved your father—he that was our kinsman and owned Rona and its old castle. But Alasdair did not speak; and, because of that, we each came to sorrow.
"My father told me he was ruined. If I did not marry Tristran de Kerival, he would lose all. Moreover, my dying mother begged me to save the man she had loved so well and truly, though he had left her so much alone.