Lavender would not promise, but all that afternoon various resolutions and emotions were struggling within him for mastery, insomuch that Duncan could not understand the blundering way in which he whipped the pools.  Mackenzie, Sheila and Ingram had gone off to pay a visit to an old crone who lived in a neighboring island, and in whom Ingram had been much interested a few years before; so that Lavender had an opportunity of practicing the art of salmon-fishing without interruptions.  But all the skill he had shown in the morning seemed to have deserted him; and at last he gave the rod to Duncan, and, sitting down on a top-coat flung on the wet heather, indolently watched the gillie’s operations.

Should he at once fly from temptation and return to London?  Would it not be heroic to leave this old man in possession of his only daughter?  Sheila would never know of the sacrifice, but what of that?  It might be for her happiness that he should go.

But when a young man is in love, or fancies himself in love, with a young girl, it is hard for him to persuade himself that anybody else can make her as happy as he might.  Who could be so tender to her, so watchful over her, as himself?  He does not reflect that her parents have had the experience of years in taking care of her, while he would be a mere novice at the business.  The pleasure with which he regards the prospect of being constantly with her he transfers to her, and she seems to demand it of him as a duty that he should confer upon her this new happiness.

Lavender met Sheila in the evening, and he was yet undecided.  Sometimes he fancied, when their eyes met unexpectedly, that there was something wistful as well as friendly in her look:  was she too dreaming of the vague possibilities of the future?  This was strange, too, that after each of those little chance reveries she seemed to be moved by a resolution to be more than usually affectionate toward her father, and would go round the table and place her hand on his shoulder and talk to him.  Perhaps these things were but delusions begotten of his own imaginings, but the possibility of their being real agitated him not a little, and he scarcely dared to think what might follow.

That evening Sheila sang, and all his half-formed resolutions vanished into air.  He sat in a corner of the curious, dimly-lit and old-fashioned chamber, and, lying back in the chair, abandoned himself to dreams as Sheila sang the mystic songs of the northern coasts.  There was something strangely suggestive of the sea in the room itself, and all her songs were of the sea.  It was a smaller room than the large apartment in which they had dined, and it was filled with curiosities from distant shores and with the strange captures made by the Borva fishermen.  Everywhere, too, were the trophies of Mackenzie’s skill with rod and rifle.  Deer’s horns, seal skins, stuffed birds, salmon in glass cases, masses of coral, enormous shells and a thousand similar things made the little drawing-room a sort of grotto; but it was a grotto within hearing of the sound of the sea, and there was no musty atmosphere in a room that was open all day to the cold winds of the Atlantic.