"He _will_ come," she said to herself, with a limitless faith. "I am sure he loves me, and that he will find me. Prison bars could not contain him, nor dangers daunt him. I know he will follow and find me. God make it soon--before the other comes." Her mind went back to the cold, sinister eyes of my Lord of Barra, and she shuddered even in the hot sunshine. "Then would the danger begin," she said; "for though all these folks are kind to me, yet not even the minister nor Betsy Landsborough would stir a hand to save me from the chief. Such a marriage is customary. It is the way of the clan. The Lords of Barra have ever chosen their brides in this fashion, they say. I am here alone on an island without boats. The chief has ordered it so. None are allowed to approach or land on Suliscanna till the master comes to claim the captive and the slave." The girl's wonderful dark eyes had mysterious depths in them as she went over in her heart the perils and difficulties of her unknown future. "But never, while I live, will I be untrue to him whom I love. If I cannot be his, at least I shall never be another's. And if they try to force me to that which I loathe--thank God there is always a way out! Gladly would I die rather than that any other should take the place that is his alone--my king, my husband!" She spoke the last words very softly, but her eyes looked wistfully out towards the far hills beyond the sea, over which she waited for him to come. Then she blushed red from neck to brow at the sound of her own whisper. She even turned her about swiftly to see that none had heard, and that no bird of the air could carry the matter. But only the sea-swallows circled widely above, along the black wet skerries the gulls wailed, and the silly moping guillemots sat in rows upon the rocks of Lianacraig. All were intent upon their own concerns that bright morning, and up among the tiny green crofts she saw Mistress McAlister, a lowland sunbonnet on her head, flashing in and out of her door in that lively and sprightly fashion which distinguished her movements from the solid sloth characteristic of even the busiest moments of the other good-wives of Suliscanna. Kate paced the shore, and thought within herself the still assured thoughts of one whose mind is made up about the main issue, and who can afford quietly to consider concerning matters less important. The sea was very still this day about Suliscanna. The white surf-rim round the great cliffs was hardly to be noted. The gap-toothed caves which pierce them were still. The roaring and hissing of the "bullers" were not heard. Only in front of the island to landward the tides swayed and ran like a mill-race, where the ledges rose black and dripping from the deep, and the currents from the ocean swirled onward, or sucked back through the narrows in dangerous whirlpools and strange leaping hillocks of sea-water.