“Will you be telling me now, Sheumas, which man it was that she loved?”
Maclean did not look at the speaker, though he stopped too. He stared at the white cottage, and at the little square window with the geranium-pot on the lintel.
But while he hesitated, Isla Macleod turned away, and walked swiftly across the wet bracken and bog-myrtle till he disappeared over Cnoc-na-Hurich, on the hidden slope of which his own cottage stood amid a wilderness of whins.
Sheumas watched him till he was out of sight. It was then only that he answered the question.
“I’m thinking,” he muttered slowly, “I’m thinking she loved Ian Mòr.”
“Yes,” he muttered again later, as he took off his sea-soaked clothes, and lay down on the bed in the kitchen, whence he could see into the little room where Silis was in a profound sleep: “Yes, I’m thinking she loved Ian Mòr.”
He did not sleep at all, for all his weariness.
When the sunlight streamed in across the red sandstone floor, and crept towards his wife’s bed, he rose softly and looked at her. He did not need to stoop when he entered the room, as Isla Macleod would have had to do.
He looked at Silis a long time. Her shadowy hair was all about her face. She had never seemed to him more beautiful. Well was she called “Silis the Fawn” in the poem that some one had made about her.