"My gough! If I didn't dream it all as fresh, as fresh, and the fight in the air, and the screams when I put the old bird in the nest--the young ones had forgotten it clean, and they tumbled it out, and set on it terrible, and drove it away--and then the poor old thing on the rocks sitting by itself as lonesome as lonesome--and little Mona crying and crying down below, and her long hair rip-rip-rippling in the wind, and--and--" Dan had got to his feet, and then seated himself on a stool as he rambled on with the story of his dream. But once again his shifty eyes came back to Ewan's face, and he stopped short. "My God, what is it?" he cried. Now Ewan, standing there with a thousand vague forms floating in his brain, had heard little of what Dan had said, but he had noted his confused manner, and had taken this story of the dream as a feeble device to hide the momentary discomfiture. "What does it mean?" he said. "It means that this island is not large enough to hold both you and me." "What?" "It means that you must go away." "Away!" "Yes--and at once." In the pause that followed after his first cry of amazement, Dan thought only of the bad business of the killing of the oxen at the plowing match that morning, and so, in a tone of utter abasement, with his face to the ground, he went on, in a blundering, humble way, to allow that Ewan had reason for his anger. "I'm a blind headstrong fool, I know that--and my temper is--well, it's damnable, that's the fact--but no one suffers from it more than I do, and if I could have felled myself after I had felled the oxen, why down ... Ewan, for the sake of the dear old times when we were good chums, you and I and little Mona, with her quiet eyes, God bless her--!" "Go away, and never come back to either of us," cried Ewan, stamping his foot. Dan paused, and there was a painful silence. "Why should I go away?" he said, with an effort at quietness. "Because you are a scoundrel--the basest scoundrel on God's earth--the foulest traitor--the blackest-hearted monster--" Dan's sunburnt face whitened under his tawny skin. "Easy, easy, man veen, easy," he said, struggling visibly for self-command, while he interrupted Ewan's torrent of reproaches. "You are a disgrace and a by-word. Only the riff-raff of the island are your friends and associates." "That's true enough, Ewan," said Dan, and his head fell between his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. "What are you doing? Drinking, gambling, roistering, cheating--yes--" Dan got on his feet uneasily and took a step to and fro about the little place; then sat again, and buried his head in his hands as before. "I've been a reckless, self-willed, mad fool, Ewan, but no worse than that. And if you could see me as God sees me, and know how I suffer for my follies and curse them, for all I seem to make so light of them, and how I am driven to them one on the head of another, perhaps--perhaps--perhaps--you would have pity--ay, pity."