hills?  There was no holiday-making so healthy, so free from restraint, as that among the far Highland hills and glens, where the clear mountain-air, scented with miles and miles of heather, seemed to produce a sort of intoxication of good spirits within one.  Then the yachting round the wonderful islands of the West—­the rapid runs of a bright forenoon, the shooting of the wild sea-birds, the scrambled dinners in the small cabin, the still nights in the small harbors, with a scent of sea-weed abroad, and the white stars shining down on the trembling water.  Yes, he was going yachting this autumn:  in about a fortnight he hoped to start.  His friend was at present away up Loch Boisdale, in South Uist, and he did not know how to get there except by going to Skye, and taking his chance of some boat going over.  Where would they go then?  He did not know.  Wherever his friend liked.  It would be enough for him if they kept always moving about, seeing the strange sights of the sea and the air and the lonely shores of those northern islands.  Perhaps they might even try to reach St. Kilda—­

“Oh, Mr. Ingram, won’t you go and see my papa?”

The cry that suddenly reached him was like the cry of a broken heart.  He started as from a trance, and found Sheila regarding him with a piteous appeal in her face:  she had been listening intently to all he had said.

“Oh yes, Sheila,” he said kindly, and quite forgetting that he was speaking to her before strangers:  “of course I must go and see your papa if we are any way near the Lewis.  Perhaps you may be there then?”

“No,” said Sheila, looking down.

“Won’t you go to the Highlands this autumn?” Mrs. Lorraine asked in a friendly way.

“No,” said Sheila in a measured voice as she looked her enemy fair in the face:  “I think we are going to the Tyrol.”

If the child had only known what occurred to Mrs. Lorraine’s mind at this moment!  Not a triumphant sense of Lavender’s infatuation, as Sheila probably fancied, but a very definite resolution that if Frank Lavender went to the Tyrol, it was not with either her or her mother he should go.

“Mrs. Lavender’s father is an old friend of mine,” said Ingram, loud enough for all to hear; “and, hospitable as all Highlanders are, I have never met his equal in that way, and I have tried his patience a good many times.  What do you think, Mrs. Lorraine, of a man who would give up his best gun to you, even though you couldn’t shoot a bit, and he particularly proud of his shooting?  And so if you lived with him for a month or six months—­each day the best of everything for you, the second best for your friend, the worst for himself.  Wasn’t it so, Lavender?”

It was a direct challenge sent across the table, and Sheila’s heart beat quick lest her husband should say something ungracious.

“Yes, certainly,” said Lavender with a readiness that pleased Sheila.  “I, at least, have no right to complain of his hospitality.”