here."

"Then dinna think aboot it. I knew ye'd be awa' afore long. It's in ye,
juist as it's in the birds. But ye'll come flying back like they do."

"Oh, Wullie, do you think I shall?" she pleaded, watching him as he
stroked his beard and looked out across the sea.

"Ye'll be back, Marcella. Very glad ye'll be tae come back, an' ye'll
find me here, juist the same. Things change little. It takes millions of
years to change everything save folk's spirits. I'll never change, till
His hand straightens me oot some day for a buryin'. But ye'll be
changed, Marcella, like Lashnagar--things will have cropped out in ye,
and things will have walked over ye."

Wullie's words comforted her, gave her a sense of security as she sat
at his side toasting fish for the last time and eating the cake that
somehow did not taste quite so good as usual. As she said good-bye to
him before she went the round of the village bidding everyone good-bye,
something impelled her to kiss his brown cheek. The last she saw of him
was his bent figure silhouetted in the doorway of the hut with a fire
glow behind it, and the setting sun shining on his eyes that were bright
with tears.

But that night she was too excited to feel really unhappy as she looked
at the boxes ready in the book-room, her little leather case lying open
waiting for the last-minute things next morning. When, even, she
blundered into the dairy to find rope and caught sight of a horrible red
pile of meat that had been Hoodie, she could not cry about it. She was
too busy thinking that, out of her adventuring, a day would come when