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But we were each following his own train of thought to the exclusion of the other’s. My uncle once more paid no attention to my words; only hung his head and held his peace; and I might have been led to fancy that he had not heard me, if his next speech had not contained a kind of echo from my own.

‘I would say naething o’ thae clavers to Mary,’ he observed, and began to walk forward.

There is a belt of turf along the side of Aros Bay, where walking is easy; and it was along this that I silently followed my silent kinsman. I was perhaps a little disappointed at having lost so good an opportunity to declare my love; but I was at the same time far more deeply exercised at the change that had befallen my uncle. He was never an ordinary, never, in the strict sense, an amiable, man; but there was nothing in even the worst that I had known of him before, to prepare me for so strange a transformation. It was impossible to close the eyes against one fact; that he had, as the saying goes, something on his mind; and as I mentally ran over the different words which might be represented by the letter M–misery, mercy, marriage, money, and the like–I was arrested with a sort of start by the word murder. I was still considering the ugly sound and fatal meaning of the word, when the direction of our walk brought us to a point from which a view was to be had to either side, back towards Aros Bay and homestead, and forward on the ocean, dotted to the north with isles, and lying to the southward blue and open to the sky. There my guide came to a halt, and stood staring for awhile on that expanse. Then he turned to me and laid a hand on my arm.

‘Ye think there’s naething there?’ he said, pointing with his pipe; and then cried out aloud, with a kind of exultation: ‘I’ll tell ye, man! The deid are down there–thick like rattons!’

He turned at once, and, without another word, we retraced our steps to the house of Aros.

I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was not till after supper, and then but for a short while, that I could have a word with her. I lost no time beating about the bush, but spoke out plainly what was on my mind.

‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I have not come to Aros without a hope. If that should prove well founded, we may all leave and go somewhere else, secure of daily bread and comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that, which it would seem extravagant in me to promise. But there’s a hope that lies nearer to my heart than money.’ And at that I paused. ‘You can guess fine what that is, Mary,’ I said. She looked away from me in silence, and that was small encouragement, but I was not to be put off. ‘All my days I have thought the world of you,’ I continued; ‘the time goes on and I think always the more of you; I could not think to be happy or hearty in my life without you: you are the apple of my eye.’ Still she looked away, and said never a word; but I thought I saw that her hands shook. ‘Mary,’ I cried in fear, ‘do ye no like me?’

‘O, Charlie man,’ she said, ‘is this a time to speak of it? Let me be, a while; let me be the way I am; it’ll not be you that loses by the waiting!’

I made out by her voice that she was nearly weeping, and this put me out of any thought but to compose her. ‘Mary Ellen,’ I said, ‘say no more; I did not come to trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your time too; and you have told me all I wanted. Only just this one thing more: what ails you?’