And it was true. Before he rowed across the loch again his future would be settled, he would be Alice Woodward's Highland proprietor. "Your left, please, Miss Carmichael," he said, giving stroke with a longer swing; "there is a nice, comfortable landing-place just beyond the white stone, and I hate getting my feet wet, even in helping ladies to keep theirs dry." "But we shall miss----" began Marjory. "Do as you're bid, my dear," put in Will Cameron, resignedly, from the bow; "haven't you learnt by this time that the laird knows where he wants to steer and sticks to it? After all, it saves a lot of trouble to others." "Right you are!" assented Paul, gaily; "your left, please; not so much as that; thank you! I've no desire to find the sunken rocks." The words were light, and a boat-load of people were listening to them; yet Marjory, guiding the tiller ropes, felt that they were spoken for her ear alone; that she and Paul were face to face, as they so often were before his future, and the fact annoyed her. Yet, as they stepped out on the little causeway of rock jutting forward like a peer, the waves blab, blabbing upon its sides, reminded her of the evening when she had sate listening to them and Paul had come along the shore behind her, like another St. Christopher, bearing the burden of the world's immortality--its childhood. "Tom," she said, in a low voice, turning to him in swift appeal, why she knew not, "let us get away from all this; we might go along the point and look for clams, as we used to do. Remember, it is the last I shall see of you; so don't talk about manners and being wanted; don't think of what other people think." She spoke petulantly, but there were sudden tears in her eyes. Yet as they moved off together neither of then realised that a fateful moment had come and gone; that the trivial words covered an unconscious revolt of one side of her woman's nature against the other, and that if, instead of hunting clams like a couple of children, he had taken her hand and told her the truth of love and marriage, as he had seen it in life, she would have turned instinctively from the world's apotheosis of passion, and so have found a compass to guide her out of danger; but Tom Kennedy, being conscious that he himself was once more under the glamour which had come and gone many times already even in his sober life, could not find it in his heart to decry it utterly. So they stalked clams instead, advancing on tiptoe over the wet sand with eyes alert for every sign of an air-hole, and then pouncing like a cat on a mouse to seize the collapsing tube before it sank down, down, into the depths of gravel where even finger nails could not follow it. And to them, as they laughed and hunted, came the Reverend James, restless as ever, yet showing to advantage in a sport which he had practised from his barefoot childhood.