So McKay went back through the fog to his quaint, whitewashed inheritance--this legacy from a Scotch grandfather to a Yankee grandson--and when he came into the dark waist of the house he called up very gently: "Are you awake, Miss Yellow-hair?" "Yes. Is all well?" "All's well," he said, mounting the stairs. "Then--good night to you Kay of Isla!" she said. "Don't you want to hear--" "To-morrow, please." "But--" "As long as you say that all is well I refuse to lose any more sleep!" "Are you sleepy, Yellow-hair?" "I am." "Aren't you going to sit up and chat for a few--" "I am not!" "Have you no curiosity?" he demanded, laughingly. "Not a bit. You say everything is all right. Then it is all right--when Kay of Isla says so! Good night!" What she had said seemed to thrill him with a novel and delicious sense of responsibility. He heard her door close; he stood there in the stone corridor a moment before entering his room, experiencing an odd, indefinite pleasure in the words this girl had uttered--words which seemed to reinstate him among his kind, words which no woman would utter except to a man in whom she believed. And yet this girl knew him--knew what he had been--had seen him in the depths--had looked upon the wreck of him. Out of those depths she had dragged what remained of him--not for his own sake perhaps--not for his beaux-yeux--but to save him for the service which his country demanded of him. She had fought for him--endured, struggled spiritually, mentally, bodily to wrench him out of the coma where drink had left him with a stunned brain and crippled will. And now, believing in her work, trusting, confident, she had just said to him that what he told her was sufficient security for her. And on his word that all was well she had calmly composed herself for sleep as though all the dead chieftains of Isla stood on guard with naked claymores! Nothing in all his life had ever so thrilled him as this girl's confidence. And, as he entered his room, he knew that within him the accursed thing that had been, lay dead forever. He was standing in the walled garden switching a limber trout-rod when Miss Erith came upon him next morning,--a tall straight young man in his kilts, supple and elegant as the lancewood rod he was testing. Conscious of a presence behind him he turned, came toward her in the sunlight, the sun crisping his short hair. And in his pleasant level eyes the girl saw what had happened--what she had wrought--that this young man had come into his own again--into his right mind and his manhood--and that he had resumed his place among his fellow men and peers. He greeted her seriously, almost formally; and the girl, excited and a little upset by the sudden realisation of his victory and hers, laughed when he called her "Miss Erith." "You called me Yellow-hair last night," she said. "I called you Kay. Don't you want it so?"