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You shall not go out in the Maighdean-mhara without taking some one with you besides Mairi. You shall never, if you are away from home, go within fifty yards of the sea, so long as there is snow on the rocks." "But that is so very many things already: is it not enough?" said Sheila. "You will faithfully remember and observe these rules?" "I will."
Mairi was bringing up a quantity of heather gathered fresh from the rocks beside the White Water; she was bringing up some peacocks' feathers, too, for the mantelpiece, and two or three big shells; and, best of all, she was to put in her trunk a real and veritable lump of peat, well dried and easy to light.
At the end of breakfast he accepted, after a little pressing, half a glass of whisky; and then, much comforted and in a thoroughly good-humor with himself and the world, got his luggage out again and went on his way toward a certain inn in High Holborn. "Ay, and where does the queen live, Miss Sheila?" said Mairi.
This was Sheila's scheme, and on these lonely evenings she could sit by herself with much satisfaction and ponder over the little points of it and its possible success. Mairi was coming to London under the escort of a worthy Glasgow fishmonger whom Mr. Mackenzie knew. She would arrive after Lavender had left for his studio.
Tell the truth, Mairi: could you have forced yourself to bring one peat?" "I wass thinking it was safer to bring sa two," replied Mairi, blushing all over the fair and pretty face. And indeed, there being two peats, Sheila thought she might as well try an experiment with one. She crumbled down some pieces, put them on a plate, lit them, and placed the plate outside the open window, on the sill.
And when Lavender went with wonder into this small room, when he smelt the fragrant peat-smoke and every one knows how powerful the sense of smell is in recalling bygone associations when he saw the smoking salmon and the bottled beer and the whisky, and when he suddenly found Mairi coming into the room and saying to him, in her sweet Highland fashion, "And are you ferry well, sir?" would not his heart warm to the old ways and kindly homeliness of the house in Borva, and would not some glimpse of the happy and half-forgotten time that was now so sadly and strangely remote cause him to break down that barrier between himself and Sheila that this artificial life in the South had placed there?
"Are you going home?" said the young girl, looking up with a strange foreboding and sinking of the heart to the pale face and distant eyes "Are you going home, Miss Sheila?" "Oh yes, we are going home, Mairi," was the answer she got, but the tone in which it was uttered filled her mind with doubt, and something like despair. "Ended at last Those wondrous dreams, so beautifully told!
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