And then, as he went out to the front, he hummed aloud, so that Sheila should hear,

  Who goes there?  Stranger, quickly tell! 
  A friend!  The word!  Good-night!  All’s well! 
  All’s well!  Good-night!  All’s well!

Ingram followed the old man outside, with a somewhat guilty conscience suggesting odd things to him.  Would it not be possible now to shut one’s ears for the next half hour?  Angry words were only little perturbations in the air.  If you shut your ears till they were all over, what harm could be done?  All the big facts of life would remain the same.  The sea, the sky, the hills, the human beings around you, even your desire of sleep for the night and your wholesome longing for breakfast in the morning, would all remain, and the angry words would have passed away.  But perhaps it was a proper punishment that he should now go out and bear all the wrath of this fierce old gentleman, whose daughter he had conspired to carry off.  Mackenzie was walking up and down the path outside in the cool and silent night.  There was not much moon now, but a clear and lambent twilight showed all the familiar features of Loch Roag and the southern hills, and down there in the bay you could vaguely make out the Maighdean-mhara rocking in the tiny waves that washed in on the white shore.  Ingram had never looked on this pretty picture with a less feeling of delight.

“Well, you see, Mr. Mackenzie,” he was beginning, “you must make this excuse for him—­”

But Mackenzie put aside Lavender at once.  It was all about Sheila that he wanted to know.  There was no anger in his words; only a great anxiety, and sometimes an extraordinary and pathetic effort to take a philosophical view of the situation.  What had Sheila said?  Was Sheila deeply interested in the young man?  Would it please Sheila if he was to go in-doors and give at once his free consent to her marrying this Mr. Lavender?

“Oh, you must not think,” said Mackenzie, with a certain loftiness of air even amidst his great perturbation and anxiety—­“you must not think I hef not foreseen all this.  It wass some day or other Sheila will be sure to marry; and although I did not expect—­no, I did not expect that—­that she would marry a stranger and an Englishman, if it will please her that is enough.  You cannot tell a young lass the one she should marry:  it iss all a chance the one she likes, and if she does not marry him it is better she will not marry at all.  Oh yes, I know that ferry well.  And I hef known there wass a time coming when I would give away my Sheila to some young man; and there iss no use complaining of it.  But you hef not told me much about this young man, or I hef forgotten:  it is the same thing whatever.  He has not much money, you said—­he is waiting for some money.  Well, this is what I will do:  I will give him all my money if he will come and live in the Lewis.”

All the philosophy he had been mustering up fell away from that last sentence.  It was like the cry of a drowning man who sees the last life-boat set out for shore, leaving him to his fate.  And Ingram had not a word to say in reply to that piteous entreaty.