now; she sits speechless
and awestricken; for the mountain-walls that overhang this sombre ravine
seem ready to fall on her, and there is an awful darkness spreading
along their summits under the heavy swathes of cloud. And then those
black lakes far down in the lone hollows, more death-like and terrible
than any tourist-haunted Loch Coruisk: would she not turn to him and,
with trembling hands, implore him to take her back and away to the more
familiar and bearable South? He began to see all these things with her
eyes. He began to fear the awful things of the winter-time and the seas.
The glad heart had gone out of him.

Even the beautiful aspects of the Highland winter had something about
them--an isolation, a terrible silence--that he grew almost to dread.
What was this strange thing, for example? Early in the morning he
looked from the windows of his room, and he could have imagined he was
not at Dare at all. All the familiar objects of sea and shore had
disappeared; this was a new world--a world of fantastic shapes, all
moving and unknown--a world of vague masses of gray, though here and
there a gleam of lemon-color shining through the fog showed that the
dawn was reflected on a glassy sea. Then he began to make out the things
around him. That great range of purple mountains was Ulva--Ulva
transfigured and become Alpine! Then those wan gleams of yellow light on
the sea?--he went to the other window, and behold! the heavy bands of
cloud that lay across the unseen peaks of Ben-an-Sloich had parted, and
there was a blaze of clear, metallic, green sky; and the clouds
bordering on that gleam of light were touched with a smoky and stormy
saffron-hue that flashed and changed amidst the seething and twisting
shapes of the fog and the mist. He turned to the sea again--what
phantom-ship was this that appeared in mid-air, and apparently moving
when there was no wind? He heard the sound of oars; the huge vessel
turned out to be only the boat of the Gometra men going out to the
lobster-traps. The yellow light on the glassy plain waxes stronger; new
objects appear through the shifting fog; until at last a sudden opening
shows him a wonderful thing far away--apparently at the very confines of
the world--and awful in its solitary splendor. For that is the distant
island of Staffa, and it has caught the colors of the dawn; and amidst
the cold grays of the sea it shines a pale, transparent rose.

He would like to have sent her, if h