on as quietly as if he had not even paused:

"Ysobel told me the first night we met that it seemed as if she could
not believe in it."

"It never seems real to me at all," I said. "Perhaps that is because I
can never forget what Jean told me about my mother lying still upon her
bed, and listening to some one calling her." (I had told them Jean's
story a few days before.) "I knew it was my father; Jean knew, too."

"How did you know?" Mrs. MacNairn's voice was almost a whisper.

"I could not tell you that. I never asked myself HOW it was. But I KNEW.
We both KNEW. Perhaps"--I hesitated--"it was because in the Highlands
people often believe things like that. One hears so many stories all
one's life that in the end they don't seem strange. I have always heard
them. Those things you know about people who have the second sight. And
about the seals who change themselves into men and come on shore and
fall in love with girls and marry them. They say they go away now and
then, and no one really knows where but it is believed that they go
back to their own people and change into seals again, because they
must plunge and riot about in the sea. Sometimes they come home, but
sometimes they do not.

"A beautiful young stranger, with soft, dark eyes, appeared once not
far from Muircarrie, and he married a boatman's daughter. He was very
restless one night, and got up and left her, and she never saw him
again; but a few days later a splendid dead seal covered with wounds was
washed up near his cottage. The fishers say that his people had wanted
to keep him from his land wife, and they had fought with him and killed
him. His wife had a son with strange, velvet eyes like his father's,
and she couldn't keep him away from the water. When he was old enough
to swim he swam out one day, because he thought he saw some seals and
wanted to get near them. He swam out too far, perhaps. He never came
back, and the fishermen said his father's people had taken him. When one
has heard stories like that all one's life nothing seems very strange."

"Nothing really IS strange," said Hector MacNairn. "Again and again
through all the ages we have been told the secrets of the gods and the
wonders of the Law, and we have revered and echoed but never believed.
When we believe and know all is simple we shall not be afraid. You are
not afraid, Ysobel. Tell my mother you are not."

I turned my face toward her again in the darkness. I felt as if
something