began to take less and less interest in the shooting and boating and fishing; and at times the old man was surprised and disturbed by an exhibition of querulous impatience that had certainly never before been one of Macleod’s failings.  Then his cousin Janet saw that he was silent and absorbed; and his mother inquired once or twice why he did not ask one or other of his neighbors to come over to Dare to have a day’s shooting with him.

“I think you are finding the place lonely, Keith, now that Norman Ogilvie is gone,” said she.

“Ah, mother,” he said, with a laugh, “it is not Norman Ogilvie, it is London, that has poisoned my mind.  I should never have gone to the South.  I am hungering for the fleshpots of Egypt already; and I am afraid some day I will have to come and ask you to let me go away again.”

He spoke jestingly, and yet he was regarding his mother.

“I know it is not pleasant for a young man to be kept fretting at home,” said she.  “But it is not long now I will ask you to do that, Keith.”

Of course this brief speech only drove him into more vigorous demonstration that he was not fretting at all; and for a time he seemed more engrossed than ever in all the occupations he had but recently abandoned.  But whether he was on the hillside, or down in the glen, or out among the islands, or whether he was trying to satisfy the hunger of his heart with books long after every one in Castle Dare had gone to bed, he could not escape from this gnawing and torturing anxiety.  It was no beautiful and gentle sentiment that possessed him—­a pretty thing to dream about during a summer’s morning—­but, on the contrary, a burning fever of unrest, that left him peace nor day nor night.  “Sudden love is followed by sudden hate,” says the Gaelic proverb; but there had been no suddenness at all about this passion that had stealthily got hold of him; and he had ceased even to hope that it might abate or depart altogether.  He had to “dree his weird.”  And when he read in books about the joy and delight that accompany the awakening of love—­how the world suddenly becomes fair, and the very skies are bluer than their wont—­he wondered whether he was different from other human beings.  The joy and delight of love?  He knew only a sick hunger of the heart and a continual and brooding despair.

One morning he was going along the cliffs, his only companion being the old black retriever, when suddenly he saw, far away below him, the figure of a lady.  For a second his heart stood still at the sight of this stranger; for he knew it was neither the mother nor Janet; and she was coming along a bit of greensward from which, by dint of much climbing, she might have reached Castle Dare.  But as he watched her he caught sight of some other figures, farther below on the rocks.  And then he perceived—­as he saw her return with a handful of bell-heather—­that this party had come from Iona, or Bunessan, or some such place, to explore one of the great caves on this coast, while this lady had wandered away from them in search of some wild flowers.  By and by he saw the small boat, with its spritsail white in the sun, go away toward the south, and the lonely coast was left as lonely as before.