"Any luck, Rick?" called a lady sitting on the doorstep of Eval House to a young man coming up the ferry-path. His rod was balanced level in his hand, his head bent forward against half a gale of wind, which, after sweeping the grass slopes into silvery waves, raced with white horses over the greener sea beyond. Yet on the doorstep, with the stone house betwixt you and the nor'west, the day was warm and still as any autumn day can be when a bright sun shines clear out of a brilliant blue sky.

She was a very small lady, looking all the smaller because the energy expressed in every line of face and figure suggested its adequacy for the direction of a far larger mass of matter. Looking still smaller at that particular moment by reason of her being overwhelmed by a fleecy lamb she was endeavouring to feed with a teapot. For the rest, a lady long past youth, yet with sufficient traces of it left to show that it had been pre-eminently attractive.

"Luck, Aunt Will? Why, yes, the best of luck. I've seen the most beautiful woman in the world."

Miss Willina smiled.

"Who will that be now? And is it twenty or twenty-one you are next month? Twenty-one, is it--yes: time passes. Then as you are so near man's estate it won't be Maclead's niece from Glasgow; she is too red in the face. Nor Katie Macqueen; you've seen her too often. Nor me, either, Rick, though I used to be called that sometimes."

The transparent vanity in her tone made her nephew smile in his turn.

"It's no home-grown beauty, Aunt Will. It's a London belle,--Lady Maud Wilson. You should just--"

The sudden upset of a lamb, whose four pointed toes strove for foothold against his legs, checked further speech. His aunt, however, waving the teapot in her excitement, filled up the pause, aided by a sick gosling which had fluttered down from her lap as she rose.

"The Wilsons! Why didn't you tell me at once? Have they come at last? And why didn't they come before? And where are their servants? Why didn't they send word to the factor? And goody gracious me, Rick! what are they going to do?"

"If you'll put that teapot at a safer distance and prevent Baalam from making me curse utterly, I'll try and explain."

A minute of frantic shoving, joined by a chorus of hounds from within, and Miss Will Macdonald returned breathless to her seat on the steps, while the sick gosling fluttered to her lap once more.

"This is what I could gather. They have been deer-stalking with friends, because the grouse here were reported late. So they are, Aunt Will, I saw a covey yesterday--"

"Skip, please."

"Ahem! Well, their servants came by last Clansman; or rather they didn't, because--"

"Skip again. I know--too rough for her to put in--won't come till return trip. Go on, dear."

"How you do bustle a fellow! They expected cooks and scullions. All the show, in fact, including a but--"

"Oh! do skip!"

"My dear aunt! you should have been a telegraph clerk. Well. Wrote for a machine to Carbost. Came along. Place shut up. Rick Halmar fishing sea pool. Saw signals of distress. Piloted 'em to harbour. Found Kirsty stacking peats. Lit the fire. Put on the kettle. Came home to tell his aunt. That is all, except that the factor is away to the Alan market and Kirsty has no English to speak of."

"They have servants with them of course?"

"A French maid. She is more solid than she looks. You see I had to help her out of the machine. She hadn't recovered the boat. They have been visiting about, and Mr. Wilson's man got left behind at Inverness, looking for lost luggage. Wired to say he would come on by the afternoon boat. Ha! ha! good joke, isn't it? Afternoon boat to Roederay. Now then, jump aboard! a penny all the way."

Miss Willina's sympathetic soul saw no cause for mirth in the vision conjured up by her housewifely imagination. She put on the deer-stalker cap lying on the step beside her. It was a signal for action, since, within the home precincts, she dispensed with any head covering save the thick masses of dark hair, which were still her greatest pride.

"I'll go over. Kirsty is an idiot, at best. She was six whole months learning the 'Happy Land' at Sunday-school.

"Besides it's not far--then your uncle's official position."

"Skip, please!" interrupted Rick, laughing. "You don't want excuses for being a trump. Come along."

His aunt's blue eyes flashed and sparkled. "Oh! my dear! was she so pretty as all that? You won't be wanted! her husband is there, of course."

"Aye! and her cousin, I think. At least, she called him Eustace."

"Two of them! Then preserve us from a third man. Go you and fish like a Christian."

"Leaving you to roam the moors alone, when I may be appointed to a ship tomorrow and not see you again for--don't laugh in that rude way, Aunt Will! Look here! Let's compromise. I'll go so far and fish Loch-na-buie till you return."

They passed the slight hollow where Eval House sought a faint shelter, and the farm-yard whence, after depositing the sick gosling, Miss Willina had to escape at a run from a motley following of birds and beasts. So to the level stretches of moor and the full force of the blustering wind. A strange landscape to southern eyes. Earth, air, and water blent in a triple alliance so close as to destroy individuality. The sea lay landwards, the land seawards, and over both the nor'wester swept unrestrained, cresting green waves of heather as water with an edging of white foam or purple blossom. Were those hills, eastward across the Minch, or clouds? Was that level streak of light westwards the Atlantic or a glint of sky? Was the water showing at your feet between miniature cliffs of sphagnum moss salt or fresh? And did the land really sway before the wind? or was it only your footstep making the spongy soil rise and fall? This, however, was in the low ground eastward. Westward the rocks began to pile themselves gregariously in cairns, and the moorland rose gradually, so gradually that when its edge was reached you were surprised to find yourself so far above the shining plain of sea.

Here on a promontory commanding a magnificent view, and also a perfect exposure to all the winds of heaven, stood the modern shooting-box of Roederay Lodge.

Substantial enough for the nineteenth century, yet reminding one irresistibly of those Swiss chÂlets in boxes which are to be bought for a sixpence in the Lowther Arcade. The fault, no doubt, of its surroundings; above all, of a sound which seemed to monopolize the whole landscape,--the sound of the Atlantic rolling in upon two miles of shelving sand a little to the southward. A sound that went on night and day, day and night, without a pause. Rhythmically true to a second, not to be shut out by any device of man. The strongest must put up with it or go away. On this particular September day, with the keen bright nor'wester sending a cross sea round the point, its voice had a querulous ring in it very different from the roar which echoed for fifteen miles across the island when the Atlantic was in a southwesterly mood.

Rick Halmar, however, being a sailor accustomed to the sea in all tempers, took little heed of its tone. He sat to leeward of a cairn which tradition said marked the grave of a Viking, and whittled away at a piece of wood he had found close by, the pretence of fishing having been set aside when Miss Willina's decided little figure disappeared from sight. He whittled with more than the sailor's ordinary dexterity; for his father had been a Norwegian sprung from a long line of ancestors who had whiled away the winter days when their ships were in dock with wood-carving. Not much else save that trick of the knife, a straight Norse nose, and a passion for the sea had Eric Halmar inherited from the father he had never seen. For within a year of that hasty marriage between the shipwrecked sailor and Miss Willina's younger sister, pretty little Mrs. Halmar was in Eval House once more, weeping and waiting. Weeping for her handsome husband; waiting for her child to be born. She wept even after the waiting was over, till consolation came in the shape of another husband; for she was not a person of great steadfastness, and even her land prejudice against the sea as a profession had given way before Miss Willina's stern common sense.

"The laddie thinks of nothing else," said his aunt; "indeed, why should he, seeing he comes of pure Viking blood on the one side, and something of it on the other, if old tales be true? Send him to the navy; then if he is drowned, it will be decently in the Queen's uniform."

So into the navy he went, and, having passed through Greenwich, was now awaiting orders at Eval; where he found a most congenial playmate in his aunt.

His still beardless face dimpled with smiles as he worked. To begin with, the wood, which had evidently been used as a cow peg, was mahogany. In other words, it must have been stolen from the drift pile on which his uncle, by virtue of his official position, was supposed to keep an eye, since the logs which the Gulf Stream leaves in its course are Government property. This amused Rick, seeing that the mere suggestion of such nefarious possibilities was a sure bait to his uncle's anger. Then the subject he had elected to carve seemed to him amusing. It was a replica of a Numbo Jumbo he had seen amongst the Caribbees, and which had tickled his fancy by its lavish ugliness. So his knife being a perfect tool-chest of implements, he gouged and punched, chiselled and filed, until, as he stuck the pointed end of the peg into the ground again, a very creditable copy of a malignant god stood before him.

"It's the best I've done yet," he said to himself; "that dodge of the bread-pellet eyes with the shot in the middle of them gives the old devil quite a live look."

He was not yet twenty-one, and boy enough to be proud of the ingenuity which had converted some sandwich crumbs and the lead off a cast into a pair of evil eyes. Man enough, however, to whistle "Who is Sylvia?" as he leant back against the cairn, smiling at Numbo Jumbo and thinking of Lady Maud.

"Rick! you bad boy!" cried his aunt's eager voice just as he was beginning to forget everything in drowsiness. "You promised you wouldn't when I threw the last into the Minch, and this is worse, ever so much worse!"

"Better, you mean. It's the best I've done. Look at its eyes!" Miss Willina pretended to shudder as her hand, instinct with righteous vengeance, went out towards the idol.

"You might leave it there till we go," pleaded Rick. "It really is the best I've done by a long way. Then you could take it home Aunt Will, and have a real auto-da-fe. It's more orthodox than drowning; besides, it will help the peats to a blaze when we go in."

She burst out suddenly into an amused laugh. "Peats!" she echoed. "Ah, Rick! if you had only seen them at Roederay. The room full of smoke, that lovely girl--she is beautiful, my dear--full of apologies. They took so long to kindle, she said. 'Excuse me,' said I, 'but you mustn't miscall a peat fire. It is the most hospitable one in the world.' They were all lying crisscross like a crow's nest, and you should have seen her relief when I had them standing shoulder to shoulder and they flared up like a Highland regiment at the skirl of the pipes. A little thing that, Rick, but so it was in all. I laughed till I cried. That house full of telephones, electric bells, hot-water pipes--all the modern whims--the factor says people won't take a shooting unless there is a fixed bath nowadays. Well! downstairs Kirsty and Janet the herd; four willing hands and no knowledge. I tell you, Kirst is just terrified of the dampers. 'Will it be blowing down the house, Miss Willina?' she says."

"Skip, please."

The remark met with a scornful neglect.

"Then upstairs those three with the knowledge but never a hand. Brains--at least two of them had, for the husband seemed fickless and no action. There they couldn't understand each other, and Mr. Wilson went about with his hand in his pocket, asking if a five-pound note would do any good.

"My dear sir," said I, "neither five, nor ten, nor fifteen will help us if the Clansman can't put in to-morrow. So let us pray for fine weather. Then I promised to lend them our cook, and we became great friends. Only, I don't know why, I felt all along as if something was going to happen; a sort of conviction things were going wrong; a kind of doubt whether we were in our right places; a description of--"

Miss Macdonald's presentiments were apt to embrace all things visible and invisible, so Rick made haste with a remark.

"And what did you think of the other man,--Eustace?"

The shot was lucky. She paused and sat looking out over moor and sea with a mysterious expression of self-complacent sagacity.

"Well, auntie? you think--"

"Nothing, my dear. Gracious goody! past four o'clock! the chickens not fed, the cows out in the wind, the ducklings still at the stream, the whole blessed Noah's Ark."

She had risen with the first word, and started off like a lapwing, so that, ere she finished, distance deadened her voice.

"Wait! please wait," shouted Rick; "the animals went in two by two, remember!"

It was of no avail; so he caught up his rod and ran after her, leaving the idol to fulfil Miss Willina's rÔle of sphinx.

It had been dark some hours before she dropped her knitting with a purposely dramatic start.

"Oh, Rick! didn't I say I had a presentiment? Now I've gone and left that wicked idol on the harp--on the Alt na heac harp of all places in the world, and you a descendant of the Vikings!"

Rick, at work on an infant Samuel for his aunt's room, looked up cheerfully.

"Well, what has that to do with it?"

"What? why, everything. Don't you know the legend? Everything left on that harp disappears. The dead take it as a tribute, and if they don't like it, they send it back to work evil to the living for a month and a day."

"Willina!"

Mr. John Macdonald was a silent man, but when he did speak, his meaning was clear. "Where the devil you get all that rubbish passes me. I've lived longer in this island than you, I've seen more of the people than you, yet I never heard such trash."

He dived back into his book as suddenly as he had emerged from it, and there was a dead silence.

"Never mind, auntie," whispered Rick sympathetically; for these outbreaks were almost the only things which upset Miss Willina's majesty. "I'll go first thing and bring Numbo Jumbo back to be burnt."

"Pray do not trouble," she replied with an audible sniff. "If I am foolish, I am foolish. If it is rubbish, I suppose it is rubbish. Only if anything happens, perhaps you will be considerate enough to admit that I foretold it."

Her hurt dignity, however, vanished before Rick Halmar's face, when he came in to breakfast next morning minus the idol.

"Gone! Oh, Rick! you don't mean it isn't there?" she cried, in not displeased excitement. "John! do you hear? It's gone, and you said it was rubbish. What do you say now?" Mr. Macdonald affected not to hear.

"Yes, it's gone," said Rick. "Numbo Jumbo's on the loose. I expect, really, that some of the crofter's children have taken it for a doll."

"It is all very well for your uncle to scoff, Eric, but the young should have more reverence for the wisdom of their elders," retorted his aunt severely.

"But Aunt Will!--you don't really believe--"

"I am not responsible for my beliefs to you, Eric, whatever you may be to me, and perhaps if you have no respect for me as your aunt, you will please to recollect that I am also your godmother. It all comes of disobedience. 'Thou shalt not make to thyself--'"

Rick leant back in his chair and roared.

"And if you can't even remember that," she went on, bristling with dignity, "you might recollect the punishment meted out to the children who mocked at the bald heads."

She paused, her hand went up suddenly to her coils of hair, she tried hard to keep her countenance, failed, and Mr. Macdonald's deep-toned laughter made a bass to her treble and Rick's tenor. That, nine times out of ten, was the end of Miss Willina's wrath.