Then he lifted his head, and there, on the white sands, stood his daughter Margaret. He was conscious of a great thrill of pride as he looked at her, for Margaret Sinclair, even among the beautiful women of the Orcades, was most beautiful of all. In a few minutes he had fastened his skiff at a little jetty, and was walking with her over the springy heath toward a very pretty house of white stone. It was his own house, and he was proud of it also, but not half so proud of the house as of its tiny garden; for there, with great care and at great cost, he had managed to rear a few pansies, snowdrops, lilies of the valley, and other hardy English flowers. Margaret and he stooped lovingly over them, and it was wonderful to see how Peter's face softened, and how gently the great rough hands, that had been all day handling smoked geese and fish, touched these frail, trembling blossoms. "Eh, lassie! I could most greet wi' joy to see the bonnie bit things; when I can get time I'se e'en go wi' thee to Edinburgh; I'd like weel to see such fields an' gardens an' trees as I hear thee tell on." Then Margaret began again to describe the greenhouses, the meadows and wheat fields, the forests of oaks and beeches she had seen during her school days in Edinburgh. Peter listened to her as if she was telling a wonderful fairy story, but he liked it, and, as he cut slice after slice from his smoked goose, he enjoyed her talk of roses and apple-blossoms, and smacked his lips for the thousandth time when she described a peach, and said, "It tasted, father, as if it had been grown in the Garden of Eden." After such conversations Peter was always stern and strict. He felt an actual anger at Adam and Eve; their transgression became a keenly personal affair, for he had a very vivid sense of the loss they had entailed upon him. The vague sense of wrong made him try to fix it, and, after a short reflection, he said in an injured tone: "I wonder when Ronald's coming hame again?" "Ronald is all right, father." "A' wrong, thou means, lassie. There's three vessels waiting to be loaded, an' the books sae far ahint that I kenna whether I'm losing or saving. Where is he?" "Not far away. He will be at the Stones of Stennis this week some time with an Englishman he fell in with at Perth." "I wonder, now, was it for my sins or his ain that the lad has sic auld world notions? There isna a pagan altar-stane 'tween John O'Groat's an' Lambaness he doesna run after. I wish he were as anxious to serve in the Lord's temple--I would build him a kirk an' a manse for it." "We'll be proud of Ronald yet, father. The Sinclairs have been fighting and making money for centuries: it is a sign of grace to have a scholar and a poet at last among them."