Save for the encroaching shadow of death, there was nothing to mark the time for the dwellers on Ithona. Mary was aware that not Alastair only, but Lora, was becoming frailer week by week. Lora, as well as Mary, knew that the child's face grew more wan and thin almost day by day. Old Seumas Macleod was weary at heart with the pity of all that he saw. Only Alastair was happy, for he dreamed; and his dream was of the loveliness of earth and sea and sky, of the pathway that came down from heaven at sunrise and led back at nightfall through the avenue of the stars to the very gates of Pharais. More happy, too, grew the others as the autumn waned, and the golden peace of St. Martin's aftermath lay upon sea and land; for their eyes saw more and more through the dreaming eyes of Alastair, more and more clearly they heard strains of the music that haunted his rapt ears.
Daily he went about clad with dream: a strange sweetness in his voice, a mystery upon his face. His eyes no longer brooded darkly; there was in them a bright light as of a cloudless morning.
If, months ago, God had filled with dusk the house of the brain, it was now not the dusk of coming night, but of the advancing day. Fantasies beset him often, as of yore, but never with terror or dismay. The moorland tarn held no watching kelpie: instead, he heard the laughter of the fairies as they swung in the bells of the foxglove; the singing of an angel where the wind wandered among the high corries; whispers and sighs of fair spirits in the murmur of leaves, or falling water, or chime of the waves.
Sometimes Lora walked or lay beside him for hours, listening to his strange speech about the things that he saw--things too lovely for mortal vision, but ultimately as real to her as to him. Hope came back to her; and then Peace; and, at the last, Joy.
When not with Lora, he loved well to be with Mary or with Seumas.
In the eyes of the former he would sometimes look for a long time, seeing there the secret home of peace, and perhaps, deeper, the unveiled beauty of the serene and lovely soul.
Seumas he had loved from childhood. The old islesman had never once been on the mainland; though in his youth he had sailed along its endless coasts. Tall and strong he was, despite his great age; and his eyes were the eyes of a young man who hears his first-born laughing and crooning against its mother's breast. Ignorant as he was of the foreign tongue of the mainland, ignorant of books, and unable to read even a verse in the Gaelic Scriptures of which he knew so many chapters by heart, he was yet strong in knowledge and wise in the way of it beyond most men. For he knew all that is to be known concerning the island and the surrounding sea, and what moved thereon and lived therein; and, in his humbleness and simplicity, he saw so deep into the human heart and into the mystery of the soul, that he was not ashamed to know he was man, nor to pray to God to guide him through the shadows.