And then again he would seek relief in hard work, and try to forget altogether this hated time of enforced absence.  One night word was brought by some one that the typhoid fever had broken out in the ill-drained cottages of Iona, and he said at once that next morning he would go round to Bunessan and ask the sanitary inspector there to be so kind as to inquire into this matter, and see whether something could not be done to improve these hovels.

“I am sure the duke does not know of it, Keith,” his cousin Janet said, “or he would have a great alteration made.”

“It is easy to make alterations,” said he, “but it is not easy to make the poor people take advantage of them.  They have such good health from the sea-air that they will not pay attention to ordinary cleanliness.  But now that two or three of the young girls and children are ill, perhaps it is a good time to have something done.”

Next morning, when he rose before it was daybreak, there was every promise of a fine day.  The full moon was setting behind the western seas, lighting up the clouds there with a dusky yellow; in the east there was a wilder glare of steely blue high up over the intense blackness on the back of Ben-an-Sloich; and the morning was still, for he heard, suddenly piercing the silence, the whistle of a curlew, and that became more and more remote as the unseen bird winged its flight far over the sea.  He lit the candles, and made the necessary preparations for his journey; for he had some message to leave at Kinloch, at the head of Loch Scridain, and he was going to ride round that way.  By and by the morning light had increased so much that he blew out the candles.

No sooner had he done this than his eye caught sight of something outside that startled him.  It seemed as though great clouds of golden-white, all ablaze in sunshine, rested on the dark bosom of the deep.  Instantly he went to the window; and then he saw that these clouds were not clouds at all, but the islands around glittering in the “white wonder of the snow,” and catching here and there the shafts of the early sunlight that now streamed through the valleys of Mull.  The sudden marvel of it!  There was Ulva, shining beautiful as in a sparkling bridal veil; and Gometra a paler blue-white in the shadow; and Colonsay and Erisgeir also a cold white; and Staffa pale gray; and then the sea that the gleaming islands rested on was a mirror of pale-green and rose-purple hues reflected from the morning sky.  It was all dream-like, so still, and beautiful, and silent.  But he now saw that that fine morning would not last.  Behind the house clouds of a suffused yellow began to blot out the sparkling peaks of Ben-an-Sloich.  The colors of the plain of the sea were troubled with gusts of wind until they disappeared altogether.  The sky in the north grew an ominous black, until the farther shores of Loch Tua were dazzling white against that bank of angry cloud.  But to Bunessan he would go.