ppear again. All this was
pleasant enough on a pleasant morning, in fresh sea-air and sunlight,
in holiday-time; and was there any reason, Mackenzie may fairly have
thought, why this young man, if he did marry Sheila, should not come
and live in a place where so much healthy amusement was to be found?

And in the evening, too, when they had climbed to the top of the
hills on the south of Stornoway harbor, did not the little town look
sufficiently picturesque, with its white houses, its shipping, its
great castle and plantations lying in shadow under the green of the
eastern sky? Then away to the west what a strange picture presented
itself! Thick bands of gray cloud lay across the sky, and the sunlight
from behind them sent down great rays of misty yellow on the endless
miles of moor. But how was it that, as these shafts of sunlight struck
on the far and successive ridges of the moorland, each long undulation
seemed to become transparent, and all the island appeared to consist
of great golden-brown shells heaped up behind each other, with the
sunlight shining through?

"I have tried a good many new effects since coming up here," said
Lavender, "but I shall not try _that_."

"Oh, it iss nothing--it is nothing at all," said Mackenzie with a
studied air of unconcern. "There iss much more beautiful things than
that in the island, but you will hef need of a ferry long time before
you will find it all out. That--that iss nothing at all."

"You will perhaps make a picture of it some other time," said Sheila
with her eyes cast down, and as he was standing by her at the time, he
took her hand and pressed it, and said, "I hope so."

Then, that night! Did not every hour produce some new and wonderful
scene, or was it only that each minute grew to be so precious, and
that the enchantment of Sheila's presence filled the air around him?
There was no moon, but the stars shone over the bay and the harbor and
the dusky hills beyond the castle. Every few seconds the lighthouse at
Arnish Point sent out its wild glare of orange fire into the heart, of
the clear darkness, and then as suddenly faded out and left the eyes
too bewildered to make out the configuration of the rocks. All over
the north-west there still remained the pale glow of the twilight, and
somehow Lavender seemed to think that that strange glow belonged
to Sheila's home in the west, and that the people in Stornoway knew
nothing of the wonders of Loch Roag and of the st