"Are you asking what I am thinking, Ishbel?" he cried, "of the lass who promised me, and who broke her word, and went out with Duncan MacLeod? Well, I am thinking chust nothing at all of her! I hef warned her that the boat was not safe, and of the squalls, and that it was not the thing for a lass like her to go so late; and she had promised, and yet she went! And this was the claymore brooch made of Iona pebbles I hef bought for you; and it can go there!" He flung the little packet remorselessly into the heather. "And as for yourself, I think nothing of you at all, and everything is over. And I am sailing for New Zealand with Mr. Campbell to-morrow. He asked me, and I said 'No,' but I will go now, and will walk into Portree this very night! _Beannachd leibh_ (good-bye)." He had turned away then, furiously. It had all passed as suddenly, swept up as unexpectedly as had the squall outside the Cave of Gold. Ishbel stood as if dazed, staring straight before her. A Highlander's rage is like a Highland storm; one bends before it instinctively. Ishbel did so now. Rory did not look back. Duncan, in the doorway, saw him stride on to the road, through the little patch of oats before the door. He set his face towards the high road for Portree. In a very few moments the sound of his footsteps died away and the night swallowed him. That was all right, Duncan thought. New Zealand! Capital! CHAPTER IV. "There follows a mist, and a weeping rain, And life is never the same again!" Ishbel might have thought of these words, if she had known them, on the morrow and on many morrows that followed. For Rory MacPhee was not the man to come back, or to speak lightly. He sailed with the agent to Glasgow--was believed to have started for New Zealand within the week. There, as far as his Skye friends were concerned, he vanished. They were the days of rare and slow communication, and Rory never wrote. But Ishbel did not marry her cousin, as everyone expected, including MacLeod. She answered him "No," listlessly, but quite doggedly, and nothing that he could say, or that Catriona could threaten, served to change her. Once the old woman muttered vengefully that she would never see the fairies, for she had lost her luck, and Ishbel turned on her almost fiercely. "It is all false," she cried in Gaelic, "for there are no green folk at all, and I do not care!" The mystery and the charm had fled; she no longer dreamed on the green grass circle, no longer wondered at the night-song of the burn, no longer watched for the kelpies under the boulders in the burns or in the Rowan Pool. Belief in the fairies had faded on the night in which Rory left her. Except in the little bald, white kirk on the hill-side, Ishbel never sang. Song dies on the lips when care and sorrow lie heavy on the heart.