“Why, there’s Katie—­Katie McCloud! and Donald Mackintosh!  For pity’s sake!” (the Prince Edward Islander’s strongest ejaculation.) “Come in! come in!” And in a second more a vision, it seemed to the dazed Donald,—­but it was not a vision at all, only a buxom young girl in a blue homespun gown,—­had seized him with one hand and Katie with the other, and drawn them both into the room, into the general whir and melee of wheels, merry faces, and still merrier voices.

It was Elspie, Katie’s youngest sister,—­Katie’s special charge and care when she was a baby, and now her special pet.  The greatest desire of Katie’s heart was to have Elspie with her in Charlottetown, but the father and mother would not consent.

Donald stood like a man in a dream.  He did not know it; but from the moment his eyes first fell on Elspie’s face they had followed it as iron follows the magnet.  Were there ever such sweet gray eyes in the world? and such a pink and white skin? and hair yellow as gold?  And what, oh, what did she wear tucked in at the belt of her white apron but a sprig of heather!  Pink heather,—­true, genuine, actual pink heather, such as Donald had not seen for many a year.  No wonder the eyes of the captain of the “Heather Bell” followed that spray of pink heather wherever it went flitting about from place to place, never long in one,—­for it was now time for dinner, and Donald and the old people were soon seated at a small table by themselves, not to embarrass the young girls, and Elspie and Katie together served the dinner; and though Elspie never once came to the small table, yet did Donald see every motion she made and hear every note of her lark’s voice.  He did not mistake what had happened to him.  Middle-aged, inexperienced, sober-souled man as he was, he knew that at last he had got a wound,—­a life wound, if it were not healed,—­and the consciousness of it struck him more and more dumb, till his presence was like a damper on the festivities; so much so, that when at three in the afternoon he and Katie took their departure, the door had no more than closed on them before Elspie exclaimed pettishly:  “An’ indeed I wish Katie’d left Cousin Donald behind.  I don’t know what it is she thinks so much of him for.  She’s always sayin’ there’s none like him; an’ it’s lucky it’s true.  The great glowerin’ steeple o’ a man, with no word in his mouth!” And the young maidens all agreed with her.  It was a strange thing for a man to come and go like that, with nothing to say for himself, they said, and he so handsome too.

“Handsome!” cried Elspie; “is it handsome,—­the face all a spatter with the color of the hair?  He’s nice eyes of his own, but his skin’s deesgustin’.”  Which speech, if Donald had overheard it, would have caused that there should never have been this story to tell.  But luckily Donald did not.  All that he bore away from the McCloud farm-house that June morning was a picture of a face and flitting figure, and the sound in his ears of a voice,—­a picture and a sound which he was destined to see and hear all his life.