There was no one visible on board the _Nighean Donn_, but a boy's voice sang a monotonous Gaelic cadence, indescribably sweet as it came, remote and wild as an air out of a dim forgotten world, across the still waters. Mary Macleod knew the song, a strange _iorram_ or boat-song made by Pòl the Freckled, and by him given to his friend Angus Macleod of Ithona. She muttered the words over and over, as the lilt of the boyish voice rose and fell-- It is not only when the sea is dark and chill and desolate I hear the singing of the queen who lives beneath the ocean: Oft have I heard her chanting voice when moon o'erfloods his golden gate, Or when the moonshine fills the wave with snow-white mazy motion. And some day will it hap to me, when the black waves are leaping, Or when within the breathless green I see her shell-strewn door, That singing voice will lure me where my sea-drown'd love lies sleeping Beneath the slow white hands of her who rules the sunken shore. For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty. The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow: The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty, Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow. The slow splashing of oars in the great hollow cavern underneath her feet sent a flush to her face. She knew who was there--that it was the little boat of the _Nighean Donn_, and that Angus Macleod was in it. She stood among the seeding grasses, intent. The cluster of white moon-daisies that reached to her knees was not more pale than her white face; for a white silence was upon Mary Macleod in her dreaming girlhood, as in her later years. She shivered once as she listened to Angus's echoing song, while he secured his boat, and began to climb from ledge to ledge. He too had heard the lad Uille Ban singing as he lay upon a coil of rope, while the smack lay idly on the unmoving waters; and hearing, had himself taken up the song-- _For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty, The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow: The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty, Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow._ Mary shivered with the vague fear that had come upon her. Had she not dreamed, in the bygone night, that she heard some one in the sea singing that very song--some one with slow, white hands which waved idly above a dead man? A moment ago she had listened to the same song sung by the lad Uille Ban; and now, for the third time, she heard Angus idly chanting it as he rose invisibly from ledge to ledge of the great cavern below. Three idle songs yet she remembered that death was but the broken refrain of an idle song.