And the people are so rich and beautiful in their dress, and all the day they have only to think how to enjoy themselves and what new amusement is for the morrow.  But I think they are tired of having nothing to do; or perhaps, you know, they are tired because they have nothing to fight against—­no hard weather and hunger and poverty.  They do not care for each other as they would if they were working on the same farm, and trying to save up for the winter; or if they were going out to the fishing, and very glad to come home again from Caithness to find all the old people very well and the young ones ready for a dance and a dram, and much joy and laughing and telling of stories.  It is a very great difference there will be in the people—­very great.”

Bras whined:  perhaps he understood her better now that she had involuntarily fallen into something of her old accent and habit of speech.

“Wouldn’t you like, Bras, to be up in Borva again—­only for this afternoon?  All the people would come running out; and it is little Ailasa, she would put her arms round your neck; and old Peter McTavish, he would hear who it was, and come out of his house groping by the wall, and he would say, ’Pless me! iss it you, Miss Sheila, indeed and mir-over?  It iss a long time since you hef left the Lewis.’  Yes, it is a long time—­a long time; and I will be almost forgetting what it is like sometimes when I try to think of it.  Here it is always the same—­the same houses, the same soft air, the same still sunlight, the same things to do and places to see—­no storms shaking the windows or ships running into the harbor, and you cannot go down to the shore to see what has happened, or up the hill to look how the sea is raging.  But it is one day we will go back to the Lewis—­oh yes, we will go back to the Lewis!”

She rose and looked wistfully around her, and then turned with a sigh to make her way to the gates.  It was with no especial sort of gladness that she thought of returning home.  Here, in the great stillness, she had been able to dream of the far island which she knew, and to fancy herself for a few minutes there:  now she was going back to the dreary monotony of her life in that square, and to the doubts and anxieties which had been suggested to her in the morning.  The world she was about to enter once more seemed so much less homely, so much less full of interest and purpose, than that other and distant world she had been wistfully regarding for a time.  The people around her had neither the joys nor the sorrows with which she had been taught to sympathize.  Their cares seemed to her to be exaggerations of trifles—­she could feel no pity for them:  their satisfaction was derived from sources unintelligible to her.  And the social atmosphere around her seemed still and close and suffocating; so that she was like to cry out at times for one breath of God’s clear wind—­for a shaft of lightning even—­to cut through the sultry and drowsy sameness of her life.