The _Luath_ forged ahead rapidly when once the sail had its bellyful of wind. She passed the _Tern_, then the _Jessie Macalpine_, caught up the big, lumbering _Maggie_, and went rippling and rushing along the wake of the _Eilid_, the lightest of the Inchghunnais boats. Off shore, the steamer _Osprey_ met the smacks, and took the herring away, cran by cran. Long before her screw made a yeast of foam athwart the black-green inshore water, the _Luath_ was in the little haven and had her nose in the shingle at Craigard point. In silence Sheumas and Isla walked by the rock-path to the isolated cottage where the Macleans lived. The swallows were flitting hither and thither in front of its low, whitewashed wall, like flying shuttles against a silent loom. The pale gold of a rainy dawn lit the whiteness with a vivid gleam. Suddenly Isla stopped. “Will you be telling me now, Sheumas, which man it was that she loved?” Maclean did not look at the speaker, though he stopped too. He stared at the white cottage, and at the little square window with the geranium-pot on the lintel. But while he hesitated, Isla Macleod turned away, and walked swiftly across the wet bracken and bog-myrtle till he disappeared over Cnoc-na-Hurich, on the hidden slope of which his own cottage stood amid a wilderness of whins. Sheumas watched him till he was out of sight. It was then only that he answered the question. “I’m thinking,” he muttered slowly, “I’m thinking she loved Ian Mòr.” “Yes,” he muttered again later, as he took off his sea-soaked clothes, and lay down on the bed in the kitchen, whence he could see into the little room where Silis was in a profound sleep: “Yes, I’m thinking she loved Ian Mòr.” He did not sleep at all, for all his weariness. When the sunlight streamed in across the red sandstone floor, and crept towards his wife’s bed, he rose softly and looked at her. He did not need to stoop when he entered the room, as Isla Macleod would have had to do. He looked at Silis a long time. Her shadowy hair was all about her face. She had never seemed to him more beautiful. Well was she called “Silis the Fawn” in the poem that some one had made about her. The poem that some one had made about her? … yes, for sure, how could he be forgetting who it was. Was it not Isla, and he a poet too, another Ian Mòr they said. “Another Ian Mòr.” As he repeated the words below his breath, he bent over his wife. Her white breast rose and fell, the way a moonbeam does in moving water. Then he knelt. When he took the slim white hand in his she did not wake. It closed lovingly upon his own. A smile slowly came and went upon the dreaming face--ah, lovely, white, dreaming face, with the hidden starry eyes. There was a soft flush, and a parting of the lips. The half-covered bosom rose and fell as with some groundswell from the beating heart. “_Silis_,” he whispered. “_Silis_ … _Silis_ …” She smiled. He leaned close above her lips.