When Angus leaped onto the slope and came towards her, she felt her pulse quicken. Tall and fair, he looked fairer and taller than she had ever seen him. The light that was still in the west lingered in his hair, which, yellow as it was, now glistened as with the sheen of bronze. He had left his cap in the boat; and as he crossed swiftly towards her, she realized anew that he deserved the Gaelic name given him by Pòl the poet--Angus the yellow-haired son of Youth. They had never spoken of their love, and now both realized in a flash that no words were needed. At midsummer noon no one says the sun shines. Angus came forward with outreaching hands. "Dear, dear love!" he whispered. "Mhairi mo rùn, muirnean, mochree!" She put her hands in his; she put her lips to his; she put her head to his breast, and listened, all her life throbbing in response to the leaping pulse of the heart that loved her. "Dear, dear love!" he whispered again. "Angus!" she murmured. They said no more, but moved slowly onward, hand in hand. The night had their secret. For sure, it was in the low sighing of the deep when the tide put its whispering lips against the sleeping sea; it was in the spellbound silences of the isle; it was in the phantasmal light of the stars--the stars of dream, in a sky of dream, in a world of dream. When, an hour--or was it an eternity, or a minute?--later, they turned, she to her home near the clachan of Innisròn, he to his boat, a light air had come up on the forehead of the tide. The sail of the _Nighean Donn_ flapped, a dusky wing in the darkness. The penetrating smell of sea-mist was in the air. Mary had only one regret as she turned her face inland, when once the invisibly gathering mist hid from her even the blurred semblance of the smack--that she had not asked Angus to sing no more that song of Pòl the Freckled, which vaguely she feared, and even hated. She had stood listening to the splashing of the oars, and, later, to the voices of Angus and Uille Ban; and now, coming faintly and to her weirdly through the gloom, she heard her lover's voice chanting the words again. What made him sing that song, in that hour, on this day of all days? 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. But long before she was back at the peat-fire again she forgot that sad, haunting cadence, and remembered only his words--the dear words of him whom she loved, as he came towards her, across the dewy grass, with outstretched hands-- "Dear, dear love!--Mhairi mo rùn, muirnean, mochree!"