ring this conversation Liot made his son understand that the
messenger of release might come at any hour; but in the morning he
felt so free from pain that David thought he could safely go to
the early fishing. When he reached the pier, however, the boat had
sailed without him, and he walked into Uig and told the minister
how near the end it was. And the minister answered:

"We have had our farewell, David. We shall meet no more till we meet
in the city of God." He spoke with a subdued enthusiasm, and his
grave face was luminous with an interior transfiguration. Suddenly
the sun came from behind a cloud, and the flying shower was crowned
with a glorious rainbow. He drew David to the window, and said in
a rapture of adoration:

"The token of His covenant! It compasseth the heavens about with a
glorious circle, and _the hands of the Most High have bended it_.
Could any words be more vitally realistic, David? Tell your father
what you have seen--the token of His covenant! The token of His
covenant!"

And David went away, awed and silent; for there was in the minister's
eyes that singular brilliance which presages a vision of things
invisible. They looked straight into the sunshine. Did they see
beyond it to where the "innumerable company of angels" were
singing, "Holy, holy, holy"?

Indeed, he was so much impressed that he took the longest way
home. He wanted to think over what his father and the minister had
said, and he wanted that solitude of nature which had so often
been to him the voice of God. The road itself was only a foot-path
across a melancholy moor, covered with heather and boulders, and
encompassed by cyclopean wrecks of mountains, the vapory outlines of
which suggested nothing but endless ruin. Although the season was
midsummer, there had been sharp, surly whiffs of rain all day long,
and the dreary levels were full of little lochs of black moss
water. So David kept to the seaward side, where the land was higher,
and where he could see the roll of a spent gale swinging round
Vatternish toward the red, rent bastions of Skye, and hear its
thunder amid the purple caves of the basalt and the whitened tiers of
the ooelite, silencing all meaner sounds.

After a trailing, thoughtful walk of a mile, he came to a spot where
a circle of druidical monoliths stood huge and pale in the misty
air. He went straight into the haunted place with the manner of
one familiar with it, cast his nets on the low central stone