“Will you let Miss Sheila alone?” Duncan called out, adding something in Gaelic which came strangely from a man who sometimes reproved his own master for swearing.  “Get away with you, you brats:  it wass better you would be in your beds than bothering people that wass come all the way from Styornoway.”

Then they all went up in a body to the house, and Scarlett, who had neither eyes, ears nor hands but for the young girl who had been the very pride of her heart, was nigh driven to distraction by Mackenzie’s stormy demands for oatcake and glasses and whisky.  Scarlett angrily remonstrated with her husband for allowing this rabble of people to interfere with the comfort of Miss Sheila; and Duncan, taking her reproaches with great good-humor, contented himself with doing her work, and went and got the cheese and the plates and the whisky, while Scarlett, with a hundred endearing phrases, was helping Sheila to take off her traveling things.  And Sheila, it turned out, had brought with her in her portmanteau certain huge and wonderful cakes, not of oatmeal, from Glasgow; and these were soon on the great table in the kitchen, and Sheila herself distributing pieces to those small folks who were so awestricken by the sight of this strange dainty that they forgot her injunctions and thanked her timidly in Gaelic.

“Well, Sheila my lass,” said her father to her as they stood at the door of the house and watched the troop of their friends, children and all, go over the hill to Borvabost in the red light of the sunset, “and are you glad to be home again?”

“Oh yes,” she said heartily enough; and Mackenzie thought that things were going on favorably.

“You hef no such sunsets in the South, Sheila,” he observed, loftily casting his eye around, although he did not usually pay much attention to the picturesqueness of his native island.  “Now look at the light on Suainabhal.  Do you see the red on the water down there, Sheila?  Oh yes, I thought you would say it wass ferry beautiful—­it is a ferry good color on the water.  The water looks ferry well when it is red.  You hef no such things in London—­not any, Sheila.  Now we must go in-doors, for these things you can see any day here, and we must not keep our friends waiting.”

An ordinary, dull-witted or careless man might have been glad to have a little quiet after so long and tedious a journey, but Mr. Mackenzie was no such person.  He had resolved to guard against Sheila’s first evening at home being in any way languid or monotonous, and so he had asked one or two of his especial friends to remain and have supper with them.  Moreover, he did not wish the girl to spend the rest of the evening out of doors when the melancholy time of the twilight drew over the hills and the sea began to sound remote and sad.  Sheila should have a comfortable evening in-doors; and he would himself, after supper, when the small parlor was well lit up, sing for her one or two songs, just to keep the thing going, as it were.  He would let nobody else sing.  These Gaelic songs were not the sort of music to make people cheerful.  And if Sheila herself would sing for them?