She was always an odd child, Catriona said, with ruddy tawny locks, and sloe-eyes, elfish and silent, doing queer, uncanny, unaccountable things, with moods of sadness and moods of mirth. She grew up in Skye, and would never leave it, though she had her chance to do so. Ishbel lived with Catriona till she was nineteen, and helped her with her spinning and knitting; she also milked the cows, and worked about the house. The girl's head was full of her grandmother's teaching; she believed in the fairies, though she rarely spoke of them. Her cousin Duncan often found her seated in the fairy-ring on the knowe, above the sheiling, picking the green grass absently, and gazing "frae her." Some day, she thought, she would hear the tap of fairy feet in their revels, hear a tiny voice which would beckon her to an entrancing world, very different even from lovely Skye. Very often she thought she had been on the brink of meeting the little green folk, and then someone had come and interrupted her. There was that night coming home over the muir from Portree--the stream, richly brown with the peat over which it gurgled, the air heather-scented, the mountains fading into the lovely purple of the night's embrace--everything hushed, save her own footfall. Ishbel had seemed to hear a voice calling her then, and had wandered up amongst the heather, her face eager and expectant. And there above her on the heather knoll, "the wee folks' knowe," seeming to float between the grey lichen-covered boulders--surely these were tiny white figures, beckoning to her? She almost ran, in her eagerness, but, just as she approached, Duncan's voice hailed her from the high road. What was she doing there? And was that the way home? Ishbel almost wept as she descended. For she could see nothing near the boulders then but waving cotton-grass amongst the bog and heather. It was lovely September now, and the hill-sides were a glory of tawny colouring, the fading heather and bracken, purple and brown, and orange, and gold, and dusky indescribable grey. Sunset came early, and tinged and stained the loch, the Cuchillans stood out sharply in their lovely serrated outline, against a background of pure gold--they were almost friendly and neighbourly, and approachable; it was in winter that they lowered and sulked in the mist, or frowned blackly from amongst the lashing swirls of rain.