fore Alison could hurry up with her lamentations.

"The sea has brought us something at last, Ailie," said he, with a curious gleam in his far-away blue eyes.

But the old woman clung to his breast sobbing, and twined her crabbed fingers in the red beard that he wore, after the fashion of his fathers, to make sure that he was alive and safe. He had to scold her into setting to work, with great ado about hot blankets and the porridge pot; and he made no scruple about helping with such homely service as he could perform.

The dumb stranger was put to bed at once, and slept so long and so deeply that more than once Ailie called him in to look; but in her breathing he found no cause for alarm. But as the hours passed in a long succession he was on the point of yielding to Alison's importunities that he go fetch the doctor, if might be, when he heard her voice again calling for gruel.

He was in the doorway walking carefully with the basin that he had overfilled, when the stranger, whose gray eyes, now wide open, had been smiling upon him in the most friendly manner, suddenly repeated in Gaelic the word gruel, as Ailie had spoken it. But when they bent over her with eager questions, she seemed frightened as well as bewildered, and would not for a long time yield to the laird's coaxing that she take the food, and he is said to have a persuasive tongue! But in the end he fed her, a spoonful at a time, and she fell asleep soon after.

The next morning, when he came in from his outdoor duties, he found that Alison had dressed the stranger and made her comfortable in his armchair before the study fire.

To his eager query, the old woman said: "Her clothes are marked E. S., but she says never a word. Try yourself."

She looked up as he entered, young, frail, curiously fairylike in delicacy of features and a certain blankness, as it seemed, of human suffering or even of happy experience.

"Well, and I'm glad to see you better," said he, in his own speech.

She looked at him with a vague interest, not strong enough to be called curiosity, her hands folded in her lap; then she turned back to the fire, humming again the little air by which he had found her.

He believed then that the truth broke upon him: she had lost her wits, and had no memory for the horrors of the night.

Conscience pricked him sharply to go to the mainland and learn whether she was missed by any of the living. It was incredible that she should have been alone on the Hester Lowrie; but all day long he fought with an unconquerable reluctance, persuading himself that it was better first to get a clew from her own lips, if possible.

To this end he began after tea with the initial "E," trying over all the names he could remember, and bringing out dictionaries until he came to the last of his resources, and she had made no response.

When he paused, she pointed to the fire, with a look that seemed to ask how it was called.

He told her in English and in Gaelic. The first word she ignored, the second she repeated eagerly, and added, with a kind of glee, the word gruel that she had uttered the day before. She seemed childishly proud to show them that she had remembered.

She continued her dumb questioning, as if it had been a sort of game, pointing to a chair, a table, a book, a stuffed bouxie, one of Ailie's great slippers in which her foot was lost-to everything that met her glance. Always she rejected the English for the Gaelic, and yet, although her accent was almost without fault, there was something strange about her that forbade his adopting her at once in thought as of his race. She seemed both as vaguely familiar and still as different, as the haunting air so often on her lips from other music that he knew.

Finally, her finger went toward himself. "Ronald," said he, and was quick in his turn. "Coila," she answered as readily.

Coila? Gently he took from her the handkerchief with which she was playing. It was a chance, but yes; in the corner were embroidered the initials E. S. He showed them to her.

She seemed to feel at once the purport of the act, though he could not tell whether she understood his words. She caught the thing away and looked at him, pouting, yet, as he had to confess, without a trace of double dealing.

He went over to his window, considering his plain duty of crossing to the mainland to relieve possible anxiety; but the seconds ticked into minutes, and when Alison came up from the kitchen she found the laird staring at the sea, and the girl by the fire asleep.

Pressed in regard to his intentions, Mac

Donald growled out something about tomorrow, and went off to bed; but the next morning, instead of setting out promptly, he put forward various things that must be done, until Ailie lost patience. All day, sitting with her silent guest and patient, who seemed passively content by the fire, she watched the doings on the sea, and now and then turned the glass that she kept on the window sill toward the piers.

But all day long the laird toyed and dallied with his conscience; and when the old woman attempted rebuke, he turned her aside with the comment that several of the patrol had seen him, and if the girl had friends among the survivors, surely-he was satisfied to conclude with a shrug.

At intervals he tried to unlock the guest's memory; but his subtlest efforts were met, sometimes by gay laughter, often with the few Gaelic words that he or Ailie had taught her, sometimes with the odd crooning, now and again developed into a kind of song, of which the words seemed mere gibberish. But the music grew so increasingly familiar, so haunting, that it fairly drove him out of the house, because he could never, for all his thinking, tell what it was.

Toward sunset Alison saw a herring smack sail away from the pier, although the season was long over; and when the boat passed under the windows of Ronaldsay Castle, she discovered that it was crowded with people, who could be no other than survivors from the wreck. She called the laird, and pointed in silence. His high cheek bones burned hot with shame, and without more ado he flung himself into his skiff and labored to overtake the smack; but when he perceived that this was impossible, and that his shouts did not carry, he turned and tacked his way to Barra.

Late at night he was home again and gave patient, brief replies to the old woman's eager questions. He had asked faithfully, he said, from house to house, and could not learn that anyone answering to his description of Coila had been missed. Moreover, although it was true that some of the passengers, and only forty or thereabout were saved out of 325, had found courage to leave in the smack, hoping to lessen the time of waiting and the anxiety of their friends, by meeting the south-bound steamer at Eig, none among these, it was said, had declared the loss of a girl like Coila.

She turned away grumbling, and chiefly

because of the ease with which the name had twice crossed his lips.

During the days that followed she had to reconcile herself as best she could to the stranger's continued presence. And yet she felt, and was amazed to feel only less strongly than Ronald himself, that the girl was at home with them, and, wordless as she continued for some while, herself felt that she belonged to that little rock island as to no other place in the world.

At the laird's bidding, Alison sought out some old-fashioned dresses that had been his mother's, and adapted them to Coila's use; she crossed over with him to Barra and bought what else was necessary. She parried curiosity, snubbed gossip, defended the situation, and where she was ignorant invented to the best of her ability; but to the laird himself she confessed that, while she did not see what else could be done, as the girl's friends seemed to be drowned, the responsibility for this strange gift from the sea preyed upon her nerves.

The days sped on uneventfully through the autumn, with no change on Ronaldsay, save that the laird had almost always a companion in his gardening and his shepherding and his fishing; and Ailie was not the worst of help about her churning and spinning and other housewifely duties.

She was like a wild bird, this Coila. She ran up among the brown and hoary heather stems for the joy of the wind. She had strange cooing talk for the sheep, the cow, the fowls; and they seemed to understand her and make response in some sort. She would carry home loads of peat, for all the laird's remonstrances, and come down to the castle, thus burdened, with a balancing dance step of her own. She learned to row, to sail, as easily as if she had once known how to do both, and had only forgotten for a time. The one day that it was warm enough to take to the water, the laird found that she could all but swim. He wondered whether some such unconscious control of balance had brought her safely ashore the night of the wreck. She was sweetly willing about the household tasks, but it was clear she endured most of them and waited with suppressed impatience the time of escape. She was all for the open air, wind and rain and sun, freedom of motion, the life of wild things.

Within doors, in rough weather, she took most kindly to the spinning, and as the gray, filmy wool slipped through her fingers, she

sang always strange, monotonous little songs that lured Ronald from his book to come and hearken; but he never understood the meaning of them, nor would she explain. Perhaps she could not.

One stormy day in December, when she would not spin, and seemed dull and sorrowful, without previous word of his intention, he crossed over to Barra and spent a noticeable portion of his minute income on such embroidery materials as could be procured. She took them, at first, he thought, to please him in return for his fatigue and drenching; but presently her own fancy caught fire; she laid aside the conventional designs he had brought, and worked her own moods in strips of strange, archaic-looking flowers and birds and beasts, and even more curious combinations of geometrical figures that the laird seemed to remember and tried to identify in his old books on the Celtic races. Once or twice he almost succeeded, but never quite.

In three weeks she could stammer a pretty broken Gaelic; in three months she could chatter; when spring came, few would have been able to detect anything foreign in her use of the tongue.

One evening, in the early winter, as the laird sat with a book and Ailie knitted, Coila suddenly dropped her embroidery, that had trailed on and on without apparent purpose until it was enough to border and stripe and girdle many a gown-this she dropped suddenly, and went to kneel by the laird's chair, laying her face on his arm.

"Ronald," she cried, "read to me. I cannot read."

He humored her posture, only reaching for a footstool to make her more comfortable; and after some little hesitation, began with an old Gaelic fairy tale.

Her cheeks shot red, she raised herself so that she could follow his pointing finger, sometimes she murmured the words with him, again she frowned over the meaning; but he could feel her heart beat against his arm and knew rather than saw that she held her breath and that the tears came.

After that she was passionate in her hunger for such things. Night after night they read together; and although at first, upon his suggestion, she tried to go on with her embroidery as well, he soon saw that it was better to give way to her childish joy and terror in ancient folklore. In her presence the old tales seemed to take on new life and new meaning.

Before the winter's end he had begun upon his own verses, in that these dealt largely with old racial themes, timidly enough at first, until he felt her delight meeting him at every step. He was heartened at length into trying them out in the world, in a foolish dream of hanging upon her sweet self the gold they should bring. Those she had blessed, the Gaelic, found ready approval but no pay; those in English, which it comforted him to think she did not know, were returned always-when he remembered to inclose stamps. It's a different story now!

So the perfect year swung around, and it must have been near the season of her first coming when he noticed a hint of change.

For some months he had been meditating upon the possibility, the reasonableness of a certain course of action; and on the night when they had been silent some little while after their reading together, and she had returned to her embroidery, he glanced at Alison dozing over her sock, and asked abruptly:

"Coila, how old are you?"

"Twenty-two," said she placidly in English, and showed no consciousness of any difference in language.

He did not move, but was aware of a painful shock of blood about his heart. When he could trust his voice, he asked quietly, also in English:

"And what is your name?"

A moment she stared at him blankly, then she gave a faint cry; and he understood that the strange presence had passed and that she I was his dear Coila again, Coila who understood no language but his mother tongue.

This was the beginning. As the days slipped into weeks, there were other moments, other words, both forgotten as the Gaelic self crept back. But always when she spoke Saxon, and the words grew into phrases and were uttered more easily, as time went on, she looked at Ronald with hostile, questioning eyes that he could not forget, and learned to dread even when she was most herself.

For some time he bore the growing trouble in silence; but at last he consulted Alison. The old woman looked grim:

"I've been waiting for this and it's been long coming, laird. You may talk now, but when I'm dead-and it will be not so many years, whatever-what then? You and your strange woman who talks as many tongues as they had at the Tower of Babel! More than that, ye've been the gossip of the island, the

whole year round, with nobody to tell you but myself, and me afraid of my life to speak, ye're that daft!"

His look checked her speech:

"What's to be done?"

She was bitter past fear when she answered:

As directly, as consciously as a child, she held up her face to be kissed; and that was her only answer.

But he continued leaning away from her, although his words were in strange disagreement with his attitude.

"Ah, Coila, if you might be mistress of

"Where?" he interrupted, and added, hotly: "I can't. She's the light of my life! And mine; by the gift of the sea!"

"Aw, well, marry her and say no more about it." He could feel her savage disappointment that one of her race, her clan, should take up with a nobody from foreign parts. He mused a while, then said:

"I've been thinking about it for months; but I can't make up my mind that it's fair." "Fair to her, ye mean?" "Naturally."

This stirred her anger again, but she waited for him to continue.

"And especially, these last weeks, when there seem to be traces of an utterly different personality." Here he touched the very nerve of his trouble.

Such talk she could not understand. addly grimly:

"Wait, then."

She

"But how long? How can I? Now that you have told me- -? I must consider!"

"Ye'll consider till ye die," said she rudely, and left him. Her love for him was deep, but not tender; and she was jealous, personally and racially jealous, as only a Celt can be.

But the falling out of the situation was beyond's the laird's control.

That same night, when Coila came and laid a book in his hand, he did not open it, but looked at her and murmured, not of his own will, he said afterwards, seeking comfort and justification:

"Must I send you away, Coila?"

She looked at him without speaking, laid one hand on his knee, and pressed closer, so that he turned aside from temptation.

When she had waited some while and still he said nothing, she laughed:

"You cannot; try."

"If I must?"

She shook her head confidently, more than

once.

"Are you so sure?" he asked, feeling himself all at once in the hands of the strong forces.

but-" He caught in vain at speech to check this madness.

She smiled a little, with a dimple that vanished as quickly as it came.

"My dear, my dear, if you only knew! I might be doing you a great injustice! Think, try to remember! Your father!"

She drew back then, and the look he dreaded came into her eyes. Once or twice she drew her breath hard, then she uttered the first sentence in English that he had heard upon her lips:

"I think he has been dead a long time." At this his trouble mastered him and he could only groan:

"Coila! Coila!"

There was silence until he looked up, and then his Coila crept into his arms and gave him freely the kiss he had so long refused, and would not be denied.

After that he gave over consideration. It is possible that superstition helped him in that he had seen his grief banish the English stranger and bring him back his Coila.

They were married quietly one day, at the parish church on the mainland. The only incident of the ceremony was a brief utterance by the bride when she was called upon to make her vow. This only the man himself heard, or, hearing, understood. "Emily Sherwood," she half whispered, and for a second her eyes dilated; then she held out her hand for the ring, and said no more.

Their only wedding journey was the sail to Ronaldsay; and it passed strangely enough for the laird, who sat grim and white by the sheet, and never once glanced toward the bonny bride, who held the tiller.

"E. S.-Emily Sherwood." The sounds repeated themselves to madness in his brain. But after all? Suppose she had forgotten, or concealed, her name, what harm? Why anticipate evil?

Alison greeted them with mumbles of smoking fires that had reddened her eyelids, told them gruffly that she had laid their supper in the study that night, and left them to such happiness as they might find in each other.

Again Coila sat and smiled into the fire, as on the day after her coming; but now she was playing with her wedding ring, a slender band that had been Ronald's mother's, made from old "angel gold," handed down for generations in the family.

Suddenly she slipped the ring from her finger, and held it toward the man who sat on the shadowy side of the fire, wondering how he should stifle the dragon of doubt that beset him.

"Take it away, it isn't mine. Mine's different; heavy and round-not the same color. Why, George-" She passed her hand across her eyes as if she were brushing away cobwebs. "Who is there?" she asked, in a tone of fear. "Ronald, your husband," he pleaded, feeling his last hope dragged away from him.

"No, my name is—" she began. "Emily Sherwood," he muttered, and could have laughed in his despair.

She glanced about the room in utter bewilderment, rose and walked to the window and back to the fire, where she stood, staring down at him as if she were thinking hard, until all at once he became aware of her presence, and rose stupidly, heavily, to meet her questioning eyes.

"Would you mind telling me? I don't know this place. I don't know where I am! There must be some mistake! I can't think what has happened."

He tried to collect his wits, and said, gently: "Would you mind telling me the last thing you remember?”

But she was losing her self-control a little: "Oh, who are you? And where is George?" She put her hands to her throat with a frightened murmur that went to his heart.

"No, but tell me, and I will find him, if he is alive." "He was quick to balance possibilities and to catch the ray of hope that shot through them. "He might have missed you in that terrible confusion; perhaps I was not careful enough"-here conscience stung"or quick enough. I had no clew to your identity." He remembered that the wreckers must have stolen her wedding ring. "Tell me where to go and all that. I will bring him back to you, if he is alive."

"No," she said, "I will go myself; this very night."

He exercised a certain cunning: "Go where? Go how?" "To London. To Leicester & Henway. Leicester is his uncle. They are big merchants in Scotch goods. Oh, let me go now!"

"You are better here," he said. "Give me the chance. Have you forgotten that for more than a year now I have been Ronald to you? Can't you trust me?" He felt that his English was awkward; he was so accustomed to using the Gaelic with her.

"I do not remember, but it is I must go and find my husband."

He had his clew, he reflected, surely a sufficient clew; but he tried once more, pleading with passionate eloquence that he be granted this quest against his own happiness. Possibly he felt that she would be at least in a measure his while she dwelt in his house, under his protection. But she would not listen.

"Wait, then," said he. "I'll call Ailie. I'll not be long."