Page:Ballantyne--The Battery and the Boiler.djvu/439

 the sea, where they received from the family resident there at the time a warm and hearty Scottish welcome.

It is not uncommon, we suspect, for eccentric natures to undertake the most important matters at the most unsuitable times and in the most ridiculous manners. At all events Robin Wright, while stumbling among the rocks and rugged ground of that midnight march in Mull, dripping wet and with the elements at war around him, conceived the idea of declaring his unalterable, not to say unutterable, attachment to Letta Langiey, who leant heavily on the arm of her preserver. But Robin was intensely sensitive. He shrank from the idea (which he had only got the length of conceiving), as if it had been a suggestion from beneath. It would be unfair, mean, contemptible, he thought, to take advantage of the darkness and the elemental noise to press his suit at such a time. No, he would wait till the morrow.

He did wait for the morrow. Then he waited for the morrow afterwards, and as each morrow passed he felt that more morrows must come and go, for it was quite obvious that Letta regarded him only as a brother.

At last, unable to bear it, our unhappy hero suddenly discovered that one of the morrows was the last of his leave of absence, so he said good-bye