But after Mary had read from the Book of Psalms, and prayed in a low voice, all rose and passed out into the sunshine; and Alastair, already oblivious of his loss, went down by the shore, and smiled with pleasure at the leap and fall, and chime and whisper, and sweet, low laughter of the sunny waters.
About a hundred yards inland from the cottage, a gigantic pointed stone rises from out of the heather. It is known among the isles as Fingal's Bolt, though neither Fionn nor his son, Ossian, ever threw that huge, flat-sided, fang-like rock. A few rude lines and even letters are still discernible on the side next the sun; but there is probably none who could decipher that old-world rune, carved in bygone ages by the hand of a Druid.
Of all places in the island, except the rocky headlands whose flanks were laved by the sea, this Stone of the Past, as Seumas called it, was that most frequented by Alastair. At its base he had listened, as a boy, to the tales of the old islander; beneath it, his fantasy now persuaded him, was one of the hidden ways that led to that House of Paradise of which he so often dreamed.
There the four silent mourners met that afternoon to fulfil the wish of one among them, who loved to think that his little uan would come back some moonshine night or in a still dawn, and, taking their hands, lead his father and mother by that secret pathway through Domhan Tòir to Tir-na-h'Oigh, whence, in good time, they would arise and go up into Pharais.
Lora had already been on the spot with Seumas. While the latter had dug the place of sleep, she, with white chalk picked from the shore, had printed in large, heavy letters these words upon the seaward side of the stone:
"Take unto Thy compassion this little one, and us who follow."
There were no words spoken as Mary, kneeling, took the child from Lora's arms, and laid it, wrapped in a white sheet filled with fragrant gale, in the wood-shored grave that had been reverently prepared.
The afternoon had grown chill. Seaward, a gray mass had risen as if out of the waste of waters.
All were still kneeling—while Seumas laid turf and heather above the small wooden lid covering the narrow house that would give the body sanctuary for a time—when the snow began to come down.
There was no wind, so the flakes fell light as feathers, grey in the gathering dusk as the down that falls from the wind-swept breasts of wild swans in their flight to or from the Polar seas.