“The end o’ what?”
“The end of that loving?”
Isla Macleod gave a low laugh. Then he stooped to pick up the pipe he had dropped. Suddenly he rose without touching it. He put his heel on the warm clay, and crushed it.
“That is the end of that kind of loving,” he said. He laughed low again as he said that.
Sheumas leaned and picked up the trodden fragments.
“They’re warm still, Macleod.”
“Are they?” Isla cried at that, his eyes with a red light coming into the blue: “then they will go where the man in the song went, the man who sought his home for ever and ever and never came any nearer than into the shine of the window-lamps.”
With that he threw the pieces into the dark water that was already growing ashy-grey.
“’Tis a sure cure, that, Sheumas Maclean.”
“Ay, so they say, … and so, so: ay, as you were saying, Ian Mòr went into the shadow because of that home he could not win?”