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She was more his own Sheila when she had donned her rough garments of blue, and when she stood on the wet deck of the vessel, with a great gray shawl around her, talking to her father with a brave effort at cheerfulness, although her lip would occasionally quiver as one or other, of her friends from Borva many of them barefooted children came up to bid her good-bye.
It was a smaller room than the large apartment in which they had dined, and it was filled with curiosities from distant shores and with the strange captures made by the Borva fishermen. Everywhere, too, were the trophies of Mackenzie's skill with rod and rifle.
Duncan, it is true, was permitted to keep her masts and sails and seats sound and white, but as for the decorative painting of the small craft including a little bit of amateur gilding that was the exclusive right of Mr. Mackenzie himself. For of course, the old man said; to himself, Sheila was coming back to Borva one these days, and she would be proud to find her own boat bright and sound.
Sheila knew that the blood was mantling in her cheeks; that her heart was full of joy; that her whole frame so tingled with life and spirit that, had she been in Borva, she would have challenged her deer-hound to a race, and fled down the side of the hill with him to the small bay of white sand below the house. She did not pause for a minute when she reached the hotel.
The King of Borva was down by the shore, seated on a stool, and engaged in the idyllic operation of painting a boat which had been hauled up on the sand. It was the Maighdean-mhara. He would let no one else on the island touch Sheila's boat.
And there is to be a greater surprise still; for we are going to make one of the rooms into the drawing-room at home; and you must open your boxes, and bring me down the heather and the peat, Mairi, and the two bottles; and then, you know, when the salmon is on the table, and the whisky and the beer, and Bras lying on the hearth-rug, and the peat-smoke all through the room, then you will come in and shake hands with him, and he will think he is in Borva again."
She hoped he was well, and that, if she could not get up to Borva that autumn, he would come South to London for a time, when the hard weather set in in the North. And so forth. But there was something in the tone of the letter that struck the old man as being unusual and strange. It was very formal in its phraseology.
It was not until the evening that Ingram called. He had been greatly surprised to hear from Mrs. Paterson that Mr. Mackenzie had been there, along with his daughter; and he now expected to find the old King of Borva in a towering passion.
Lavender was down at the shore, or had gone out fishing, or something of that sort, and would return soon enough. It was Sheila, not he, whom she was concerned about. Indeed, Mairi had caught up a little of that jealousy of Lavender which was rife among the Borva folks. They would speak no ill of Mr. Lavender.
She would have written about it to the old man in Borva, and bid him consider how she had been transformed, and what strange scenes Bras was now witnessing. But all that was over. She felt as if she could no longer ask her husband to be amused by her childish experiences; and as for writing to her father, she dared not write to him in her present mood. Perhaps some happier time would come.
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