“Val!” came Fay’s voice faintly from out the darkness, after a long, a measureless silence, “are we drifting in a circle? Can you see anything anywhere to tell us where we are?”
“It’s black as the Styx,” answered Val, trying to pitch his voice to a cheerful note, “and I can’t see even your face, dearest. Stretch out your hand; at least let me feel that in mine!”
Were they drifting in a circle? What in heaven’s name were they doing? And hark! What was that booming, hollow sound? Was it the thunder upon them at last, or was it the sea breaking over some subterranean cavern? And what meant this sudden change in the easy swinging motion of the boat? Had another current caught them now, or was this the tide coming in full and fresh from the Atlantic?
Fay’s hand, lying cold and tremulous in his own, was suddenly withdrawn. Something white seemed to flutter about her in the darkness, and Val, straining his eyes, made out that she was bandaging her eyes with her handkerchief.
She, too, must have felt that a crisis was at hand.
“Don’t be angry, Val,” she said pleadingly, “but I cannot face it.”
Minutes seemed to prolong themselves into hours. Only prisoners standing in the dock, awaiting the sentence of the judge, could understand with what leaden feet time went for them now. Fay, sitting blindfold and mute, could have fancied she had lived through, not half-an-hour, but half a lifetime in the brief space that elapsed between the turn of the tide and the break of day.
“Look up, Fay,” suddenly, sharply said Val, with an odd, jarring, out-of-tune note in his voice.
Fay pulled her handkerchief from her eyes.
Yes, the dawn was upon them at last. All around the darkness was being torn into shreds; the mists were growing silvery, the mountain tops were catching a tender grey, although to their rugged sides the night-blue was clinging still. But what—what shore was this that the mystic light half-hid and half revealed?
Fay turned her white face towards Val.
“It is Kismet!” she said brokenly; and bowing her head, she once more covered her eyes with her hands.
The sight that she would fain have shut out from them was nothing less than the familiar shores of Glen Orchol, with its ribbed and ridged cliffs and its green plateaux crowned with the beech-woods and turreted castle.
They had drifted in a circle with a vengeance!
Glen Orchol stands in the very centre of Loch Rhuy and the current that had carried them out of the loch on one side of the island had carried them in again on the other, and within these familiar waters, drifting hither and thither they had passed the whole of that dread night.
On the shallow shores of the green plateau, dominated by the castle, the tide was landing them. Val had to jump from the boat and drag it up the shingle, or it would have been dashed against a jutting spur of rock, for the tide was coming in furiously now.
Standing up to his knees in it, he lifted Fay out of the boat and carried her towards the shore.
“It is a fate to which it would be sheer folly to bow,” he said, holding her tightly in his arms; “do you think that Euan Mackreth would—”
His sentence was not to be finished. At that moment a bareheaded, bare-legged fisher-lad came speeding breathlessly over rock and shingle towards them.
He had a strange story to tell when his breath came back to him. At first he could only point a little further along the shore to a break in the rocks, to the selfsame spot, in fact, that had been Val’s and Fay’s trysting-place overnight.
Fay, following the direction of the lad’s hand, saw a group of shadowy figures gathered around what appeared to be a prostrate form.
More than this she could not clearly make out. For although the threatening storm had evidently swept over their heads and the clouds were being broken into fragments to let out the glories of the dawn, the spray rose high with the incoming tide, and the night shadows lingered in the hollows still.
Yet her heart seemed to tell her the meaning of that group as, with swift steps, she made her way along the shore, Val following, and the fisher-lad by her side telling his strange tale in an odd mixture of Gaelic and English.
It was to the effect that the “laird” (as he styled Euan Mackreth), after a long consultation with old Angus overnight about some projected improvements on his estate, had gone out in company with him to survey a site that he deemed suitable for a pavilion that he was desirous of building for his future wife, who loved the magnificent seascapes to be seen from those rocks. The site was surveyed and approved; the night was hot, the moon bright and, tempted by the low tide, the laird and old Angus decided to descend the mountain path and return to the Castle along the shore. Halfway down that path—the very one that Fay had descended to meet her lover—Euan’s foot had slipped, and he had fallen heavily, some fifteen or twenty feet, on to a projecting ledge of rock, losing consciousness and sustaining serious and, it was feared, fatal internal injuries. Angus had contrived to swing himself down to this ledge of rock, and there had supported the laird in his arms until help had arrived. That, however, had not been until close upon daybreak. Fay’s absence from her room had been discovered by her mother almost
