“Well, do you expect to see his ghost?” Macleod said.  “Come, Hamish, you have lost your nerve in the South.  Surely you are not afraid of being anywhere in the old yacht so long as she has good sea-room around her?”

“And if you are not wishing to go up the Sound of Iona in the daylight, Sir Keith,” Hamish said, still clinging to the point, “we could bear a little to the south, and go round the outside of Iona.”

“The Dubh-Artach men would recognize the Umpire at once,” Macleod said, abruptly; and then he suggested to Hamish that he should get a little more way on the yacht, so that she might be a trifle steadier when Christina carried the dinner into the English lady’s cabin.  But indeed there was now little breeze of any kind.  Hamish’s fears of a dead calm was likely to prove true.

Meanwhile another conversation had been going forward in the small cabin below, that was now suffused by a strange warm light reflected from the evening sky.  Miss White was looking very well now, after her long sea-voyage.  During their first few hours in blue water she had been very ill indeed; and she repeatedly called en Christina to allow her to die.  The old Highland-woman came to the conclusion that English ladies were rather childish in their way; but the only answer she made to this reiterated prayer was to make Miss White as comfortable as was possible, and to administer such restoratives as she thought desirable.  At length, when recovery and a sound appetite set in, the patient began to show a great friendship for Christina.  There was no longer any theatrical warning of the awful fate in store for everybody connected with this enterprise.  She tried rather to enlist the old woman’s sympathies on her behalf, and if she did not very well succeed in that direction, at least she remained on friendly terms with Christina and received from her the solace of much gossip about the whereabouts and possible destination of the ship.

And on this evening Christina had an important piece of news.

“Where have we got to now, Christina?” said Miss White, quite cheerfully, when the old woman entered.

“Oh yes, mem, we will still be off the Mull shore, but a good piece away from it, and there is not much wind, mem.  But Hamish thinks we will get to the anchorage the night whatever.”

“The anchorage!” Miss White exclaimed eagerly.  “Where?  You are going to Castle Dare, surely?”

“No, mem, I think not,” said Christina.  “I think it is an island; but you will not know the name of that island—­there is no English for it at all.”

“But where is it?  Is it near Castle Dare?”

“Oh no, mem; it is a good way from Castle Dare; and it is out in the sea.  Do you know Gometra, mem?—­wass you ever going out to Gometra?”

“Yes, of course, I remember something about it anyway.”

“Ah, well, it is away out past Gometra, mem; and not a good place for an anchorage whatever; but Hamish he will know all the anchorages.”