Onward they rode till they came to Haut-Kerloek, the ancient village on the slope of the hill above the little town. There, at the Gloire de Kerival they stopped for the night. Next morning they resumed their journey, and the same afternoon reached St. Blaise-sur-Loise, where they knew they would find the body of General Alasdair Carmichael.
And it was thus that, by the strange irony of fate, Alasdair Carmichael, who had never seen his son, who in turn had unknowingly witnessed his father's tragic death, was followed to the grave-side by that dear child for whom he had so often longed, and that by Alan's side was the daughter of the man who had done so much to ruin his life and had at the last slain him. At the same hour, on the same day, Lois de Kerival was laid to her rest, with none of her kith and kin to lament her; for Tristran the Silent was alone in his austere grief. Two others were there, at whom the Curé looked askance: the rude woodlander, Judik Kerbastiou, and another forest estray, a gypsy woman with a shawl over her head. The latter must have known the Marquise's charity, for the good woman wept quietly throughout the service of committal, and, when she turned to go, the Curé heard a sob in her throat.
It took but a brief while for Alan to settle his father's few affairs. Among the papers he found one addressed to himself: a long letter wherein was set forth not only all necessary details concerning Alan's mother and father, but also particulars about the small fortune that was in keeping for him in Edinburgh, and the lonely house on the lonely Isle of Rona among the lonely Hebrides.
In St. Blaise Alan and Ynys went before the civil authorities, and were registered as man and wife. The next day they resumed their journey toward that exile which they had in view.
Thereafter, slowly, and by devious ways, they fared far north. At Edinburgh Alan had learned all that was still unexplained. He found that there would be enough money to enable Ynys and himself to live quietly, particularly at so remote a place as Rona. The castle or "keep" there was unoccupied, and had, indeed, long been untenanted save by the widow-woman Kirsten Macdonald, Ian's sister. In return for this home, she had kept the solitary place in order. All the furniture that had been there, when Alasdair Carmichael was last in Rona, remained. In going thither, Alan and Ynys would be going home.
The westward journey was a revelation to them. Never had there been so beautiful a May, they were told. They had lingered long at the first place where they heard the sweet familiar sound of the Gaelic. Hand in hand, they wandered over the hill-sides of which the very names had a poignant home-sweetness; and long, hot hours they spent together on lochs of which Lois de Kerival had often spoken with deep longing in her voice.
As they neared the extreme of the mainland, Alan's excitement deepened. He spoke hardly a word on the day the steamer left the Argyle coast behind, and headed for the dim isles of the sea, Coll and Tiree; and again on the following day Ynys saw how distraught he was, for, about noon, the coast-line of Uist loomed, faintly blue, upon the dark Atlantic horizon.
At Loch Boisdale, where they disembarked, and whence they had to sail the remainder of their journey in a fishing schooner, which by good fortune was then there and disengaged, Ian was for the first time recognized. All that evening Alan and Ynys talked with the islesmen; Alan finding, to his delight, his Gaelic was so good that none for a moment suspected he had not lived in the isles all his life. That of Ynys, however, though fluent, had a foreign sound in it which puzzled the admiring fishermen.
It was an hour after sunrise when the Blue Herring sailed out of Loch Boisdale, and it was an hour before sunset when the anchor dropped in Borosay Haven.