His voice went on and on, rising, falling, then rising again, the guttural many-syllabled Gaelic flowing and flowing like a stream. Some belated cormorants came flying across the water from Aranmore, uttering dull croaks as they went. The heavy smoke of the kelp-fires trailed across the bay, and as the curragh passed through it, filled their nostrils with its sharp, briny scent, lying behind them as they passed like a bar of solid cotton. Sometimes, in the interest of his narrative, Murdough’s voice rose to a shout, as he waved his arms in the air, shook his fist at an imaginary opponent, or looked appealingly at his auditor for a response. Grania, however, never uttered word or syllable. She hardly looked at him, could not have told afterwards what he had been talking about, or what had passed them by. They took to their oars again after half an hour, and rowed slowly homeward, past the western extremity of the smaller island, foreshortened here to a low conical hill; across the Foul Sound, where the swell was breaking in puffs of spray across the skerries; on and on till once more their own island stood before them, its big rath making it seem from this point lower even than usual. It was very dark indeed now. They had to feel their way as they best could round the outlying reefs, all but grinding against them, till they finally ran the curragh ashore upon the single spit of firm sand just below the old church of Cill-Cananach. Dark or light, hot or cold, sunlight, starlight, moonlight, it was all one that evening to Grania. The world itself seemed to have changed; to stand still; to be a new world. Everything about and around her had changed--the sea, the sky, the boat, the rocks, the shore--above all, herself; herself and Murdough. She knew now what she had only guessed before--knew it through every pulse and artery of her body. The old walls had broken down. The common heritage was at last hers--hers and, as it seemed to her, his also. They loved; they were together. How, then, could the world fail to have changed? Even after they had at last touched the shore; after she had got out of the boat and had helped Murdough to pull it up on the sands; after they had left it behind them, with that queer, twinkling greenish water still flapping fantastically around its sides; even then she seemed to herself to be still in a dream, still to be dazed, still to be walking amongst the clouds. She only came back fully to life and to ordinary reality again when they had left the sands, and the sea, and the green, uncanny phosphorescence behind them, and were mounting soberly, one after the other, up the narrow, shingle-covered track which led to the cabin. CHAPTER VII