water!--how she tightened her lips with a joyous determination as the
sheets were hauled close, and the gunwale of the small boat heeled over
so that it almost touched the hissing and gurgling foam!--how she
laughed at Duncan's anxiety as she rounded some rocky point, and sent
the boat spinning into the clear and smooth waters of the bay! Perhaps,
after all, it was too bad to keep the poor child so long shut up in a
city. She was evidently longing for a breath of sea-air, and for some
brief dash of that brisk, fearless life on the sea-coast that she used
to love. It was a happy life, after all; and he had himself enjoyed it
when his hands and face got browned by the sun, when he grew to wonder
how any human being could wear black garments and drink foreign wines
and smoke cigars at eighteenpence apiece, so long as frieze coats,
whisky and a brier-root pipe were procurable. How one slept up in that
remote island, after all the laughing and drinking and singing of the
evening were over! How sharp was the monition of hunger when the keen
sea-air blew about your face on issuing out in the morning! and how
fresh and cool and sweet was that early breeze, with the scent of
Sheila's flowers in it! Then the long, bright day at the river-side,
with the black pools rippling in the wind, and in the silence the rapid
whistle of the silken line through the air, with now and again the
"blob" of a big salmon rising to a fly farther down the pool! Where was
there any rest like the rest of the mid-day luncheon, when Duncan had
put the big fish, wrapped in rushes, under the shadow of the nearest
rock, when you sat down on the warm heather and lit your pipe, and began
to inquire where you had been bitten on hands and neck by the ferocious
"clegs" while you were too busy in playing a fifteen-pounder to care?
Then, perhaps, as you were sitting there in the warm sunlight, with all
the fresh scents of the moorland around, you would hear a light footstep
on the soft moss; and, turning round, here was Sheila herself, with a
bright look in her pretty eyes, and a half blush on her cheek, and a
friendly inquiry as to the way the fish had been behaving. Then the
beautiful, strange, cool evenings on the shores of Loch Roag, with the
wild, clear light still shining in the northern heavens, and the sound
of the waves getting to be lonely and distant; or, still later, out in
Sheila's boat, with the great yellow moon rising up over Suainabhal and
Mealasa