gain, Miss Sheila, you will neffer hef to go away again, not any more."

Sheila looked at the girl--at the pretty pale face, the troubled
light-blue eyes and the abundant fair-yellow hair. It was Mairi, sure
enough, who was talking to her, and yet it was in a strange place. There
was no sea dashing outside, no tide running in from the Atlantic. And
where was old Scarlett, with her complaints and her petulance and her
motherly kindness?

"It is a pity you have come to London, Mairi," Sheila said wistfully;
"for I have no house to take you into; and we must go now and find one."

"You will not go back to sa Lewis, Miss Sheila?"

"They would not know me in the Lewis any more, Mairi. I have been too
long away, and I am quite changed. It is many a time I will think of
going back; but when I left the Lewis I was married, and now--How could
I go back to the Lewis, Mairi? They would look at me. They would ask
questions. My father would come down to the quay, and he would say,
'Sheila, have you come back alone?' And all the story of it would go
about the island, and every one would say I had been a bad wife, and my
husband had gone away from me."

"There is not any one," said Mairi, with the tears starting to her eyes
again--"not from one end of sa island to sa other--would say that of
you, Miss Sheila; and there is no one would not come to meet you, and be
glad sat you will come again to your own home. And as for going back, I
will be ferry glad to go back whatever, for it was you I was come to
see, and not any town; and I do not like this town, what I hef seen of
it, and I will be ferry glad to go away wis you, Miss Sheila."

Sheila did not answer. She felt that it was impossible she could go back
to her own people with this disgrace upon her, and did not even argue
the question with herself. All her trouble now was to find some harbor
of refuge into which she could flee, so that she might have quiet and
solitude, and an opportunity of studying all that had befallen her. The
noise around her--the arrival of travelers, the transference of luggage,
the screaming of trains--stunned and confused her; and she could only
vaguely think of all the people she knew in London, to see to whom she
could go for advice and direction. They were not many. One after the
other she went over the acquaintances she had made, and not one of them
appeared to her in the light of a friend. One friend she had who would
have rejoiced to be of the le