“Ay, Sheila,” he said, falling into the old habit quite naturally, “you will find it different from Borvabost.  You will have no scampering about the rocks with your head bare and your hair flying about.  You will have to dress more correctly there than here even; and, by the way, you must be busy getting ready, so I will go.”

“Oh no,” she said with a quick look of disappointment, “you will not go yet.  If I had known you were coming—­But it was very late when we will get home this morning:  two o’clock it was.”

“Another ball?”

“Yes,” said the girl, but not very joyfully.

“Why, Sheila,” he said with a grave smile on his face, “you are becoming quite a woman of fashion now.  And you know I can’t keep up an acquaintance with a fine lady who goes to all these grand places and knows all sorts of swell people; so you’ll have to cut me, Sheila.”

“I hope I shall be dead before that time ever comes,” said the girl with a sudden flash of indignation in her eyes.  Then she softened:  “But it is not kind of you to laugh at me.”

“Of course I did not laugh at you,” he said taking both her hands in his, “although I used to sometimes when you were a little girl and talked very wild English.  Don’t you remember how vexed you used to be, and how pleased you were when your papa turned the laugh against me by getting me to say that awful Gaelic sentence about ’A young calf ate a raw egg’?”

“Can you say it now?” said Sheila, with her face getting bright and pleased again.  “Try it after me.  Now listen.”

She uttered some half dozen of the most extraordinary sounds that any language ever contained, but Ingram would not attempt to follow her.  She reproached him with having forgotten all that he had learnt in Lewis, and said she should no longer look on him as a possible Highlander.

“But what are you now?” he asked.  “You are no longer that wild girl who used to run out to sea in the Maighdean-mhara whenever there was the excitement of a storm coming on.”

“Many times,” she said slowly and wistfully, “I will wish that I could be that again for a little while.”

“Don’t you enjoy, then, all those fine gatherings you go to?”

“I try to like them.”

“And you don’t succeed?”

He was looking at her gravely and earnestly, and she turned away her head and did not answer.  At this moment Lavender came down stairs and entered the room.

“Hillo, Ingram, my boy! glad to see you!  What pretty flowers!  It’s a pity we can’t take them to Brighton with us.”

“But I intend to take them,” said Sheila firmly.

“Oh, very well, if you don’t mind the bother,” said her husband.  “I should have thought your hands would have been full:  you know you’ll have to take everything with you you would want in London.  You will find that Brighton isn’t a dirty little fishing-village in which you’ve only to tuck up your dress and run about anyhow.”