He left the house and went vaguely down to the sea.  The cold air, scented strongly with the seaweed, blew about him, and was sweet and fresh on the lips and the forehead.  How strange was the monotonous sound of the waves, mournful and distant, like the sound in a seashell!  That alone spoke in the awful stillness of the night, and it seemed to be telling of those things which the silent stars and the silent hills had looked down on for ages and ages.  Did Sheila really love this terrible thing, with its strange voice talking in the night, or did she not secretly dread it and shudder at it when she sang of all that old sadness?  There was ringing in his ears the “Wail of Dunevegan” as he listened for a while to the melancholy plashing of the waves all around the lonely shores; and there was a cry of “Dunevegan, oh!  Dunevegan, oh!” weaving itself curiously with those wild pictures of Sheila in London which were still floating before his imagination.

He walked away around the coast, seeing almost nothing of the objects around him, but conscious of the solemn majesty of the mountains and the stillness of the throbbing stars.  He could have called aloud, “Sheila!  Sheila!” but that all the place seemed associated with her presence; and might he not turn suddenly to find her figure standing by him, with her face grown wild and pale as it was in the ballad, and a piteous and awful look in her eyes?  Did the figure accuse him?  He scarcely dared look round, lest there should be a phantom Sheila appealing to him for compassion, and complaining against him with her speechless eyes for a wrong that he could not understand.  He fled from her, but he knew she was there; and all the love in his heart went out to her as if beseeching her to go away and forsake him, and forgive him the injury of which she seemed to accuse him.  What wrong had he done her that he should be haunted by this spectre, that did not threaten, but only looked piteously toward him with eyes full of entreaty and pain?

He left the shore, and blindly made his way up to the pasture-land above, careless whither he went.  He knew not how long he had been away from the house, but here was a small fresh-water lake set round about with rushes, and far over there in the east lay a glimmer of the channels between Borva and Lewis.  But soon there was another light in the east, high over the low mists that lay along the land.  A pale blue-gray arose in the cloudless sky, and the stars went out one by one.  The mists were seen to lie in thicker folds along the desolate valleys.  Then a faintly yellow whiteness stole up into the sky, and broadened and widened, and behold! the little moorland loch caught a reflection of the glare, and there was a streak of crimson here and there on the dark-blue surface of the water.  Loch Roag began to brighten.  Suainabhal was touched with rose-red on its eastern slopes.  The Atlantic seemed to rise out of its purple sleep with the new light of