“I think you have won the sweepstakes, Miss White,” Macleod said.  “Your enemy has lost eight minutes.”

She was not thinking of sweepstakes.  She seemed to have been greatly frightened by the accident.

“It would have been so dreadful to see a man drowned before your eyes—­in the midst of a mere holiday excursion.”

“Drowned?” he cried.  “There?  If a sailor lets himself get drowned in this water, with all these boats about, he deserves it.”

“But there are many sailors who cannot swim at all.”

“More shame for them,” said he.

“Why, Sir Keith,” said Mrs. Ross, laughing, “do you think that all people have been brought up to an amphibious life like yourself?  I suppose in your country, what with the rain and the mist, you seldom know whether you are on sea or shore.”

“That is quite true,” said he, gravely.  “And the children are all born with fins.  And we can hear the mermaids singing all day long.  And when we want to go anywhere, we get on the back of a dolphin.”

But he looked at Gertrude White.  What would she say about that far land that she had shown such a deep interest in?  There was no raillery at all in her low voice as she spoke.

“I can very well understand,” she said, “how the people there fancied they heard the mermaids singing—­amidst so much mystery, and with the awfulness of the sea around them.”

“But we have had living singers,” said Macleod, “and that among the Macleods, too.  The most famous of all the song-writers of the Western Highlands was Mary Macleod, that was born in Harris—­Mairi Nighean Alasdair ruaidh, they called her, that is, Mary, the daughter of Red Alister.  Macleod of Dunvegan, he wished her not to make any more songs; but she could not cease the making of songs.  And there was another Macleod—­Fionaghal, they called her, that is the Fair Stranger.  I do not know why they called her the Fair Stranger—­perhaps she came to the Highlands from some distant place.  And I think if you were going among the people there at this very day, they would call you the Fair Stranger.”

He spoke quite naturally and thoughtlessly:  his eyes met hers only for a second; he did not notice the soft touch of pink that suffused the delicately tinted cheek.

“What did you say was the name of that mysterious stranger?” asked Mrs. Ross—­“that poetess from unknown lands?”

“Fionaghal,” he answered.

She turned to her husband.

“Hugh,” she said, “let me introduce you to our mysterious guest.  This is Fionaghal—­this is the Fair Stranger from the islands—­this is the poetess whose melodies the mermaids have picked up.  If she only had a harp, now—­with sea-weed hanging from it—­and an oval mirror—­”