“I have tried a good many new effects since coming up here,” said Lavender, “but I shall not try that.”

“Oh, it iss nothing—­it is nothing at all,” said Mackenzie with a studied air of unconcern.  “There iss much more beautiful things than that in the island, but you will hef need of a ferry long time before you will find it all out.  That—­that iss nothing at all.”

“You will perhaps make a picture of it some other time,” said Sheila with her eyes cast down, and as he was standing by her at the time, he took her hand and pressed it, and said, “I hope so.”

Then, that night!  Did not every hour produce some new and wonderful scene, or was it only that each minute grew to be so precious, and that the enchantment of Sheila’s presence filled the air around him?  There was no moon, but the stars shone over the bay and the harbor and the dusky hills beyond the castle.  Every few seconds the lighthouse at Arnish Point sent out its wild glare of orange fire into the heart, of the clear darkness, and then as suddenly faded out and left the eyes too bewildered to make out the configuration of the rocks.  All over the north-west there still remained the pale glow of the twilight, and somehow Lavender seemed to think that that strange glow belonged to Sheila’s home in the west, and that the people in Stornoway knew nothing of the wonders of Loch Roag and of the strange nights there.  Was he likely ever to forget?

“Good-bye, Sheila,” he said next morning, when the last signal had been given and the Clansman was about to move from her moorings.

She had bidden good-bye to Ingram already, but somehow she could not speak to his companion just at this last moment.  She pressed his hand and turned away, and went ashore with her father.  Then the big steamer throbbed its way out of the harbor, and by and by the island of Lewis lay but as a thin blue cloud along the horizon; and who could tell that human beings, with strange hopes and fancies and griefs, were hidden away in that pale line of vapor?

CHAPTER IX.

“FAREWELL, MACKRIMMON!”

A night journey from Greenock to London is a sufficiently prosaic affair in ordinary circumstances, but it need not be always so.  What if a young man, apparently occupied in making himself comfortable and in talking nonsense to his friend and companion, should be secretly calculating how the journey could be made most pleasant to a bride, and that bride his bride?  Lavender made experiments with regard to the ways and tempers of guards; he borrowed planks of wood with which to make sleeping-couches of an ordinary first-class carriage; he bribed a certain official to have the compartment secured; he took note of the time when, and the place where, refreshments could be procured:  all these things he did, thinking of Sheila.  And when Ingram, sometimes surprised by his good-nature, and occasionally