hen he turned to the horses and sent them on, with his head down to
escape the rain, and a look on his face like that of a dead man.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within
the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper, and
said, "That is the King of Borva."

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, "It
iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home
to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of
Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss
gone away, and there iss nobody--not anybody at all--left in the island
to tek the side o' the poor folk."

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to
many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the
lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain
had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the
drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the deary wastes of
moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before
and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were
passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break
the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance
rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down
from those mountains, ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out
hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes,
with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere
around were the traces of the glacier-drift--great gray boulders of
gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss or set amid the browns and
greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of
rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and
turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had
grown still darker, and to the fisherman passing by the coast it must
have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the
louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the
first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely
route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm,
but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the b