The preacher, more and more puzzled, followed her strange guide, as he led the way toward a point of rock not far distant.
“She’ll be here, likely!” he said. “She often stops here on her way home, Isly does, to look about her, and see the lay of the land. She thinks, too, Isly does! A power of thinkin’ she keeps up! Wonderful, for one of her size, if she warn’t a Heron, and thinkin’ natural to ’em all,—wonderful!”
They turned the point of rock, and came directly upon the person of whom they were in search. She was standing still, with her hands folded, looking out to sea; a slender, youthful figure, lonely as the rocks around her. This was Isla Heron. And while Joe Brazybone, in his clumsy way, is presenting the preacher to her, as if the crown he fancied were shining in actual gold on her head, let us go back a little, and see who the child is, and who her father was, the Giles Heron who was so faithfully loved, and who is now gone to his own place.
THE child Isla might have been twelve years old when her father died. Giles Heron was the last man of his people, unless you counted the boy, and no one did count him. The Herons had owned the whole island once, but, bit by bit, it had passed away from the name, if not from the blood; they had no gift for keeping, it was said. A roving people, the Herons mostly died at sea, or, if women, married into families on the main, as we call the shore that on fine days can be dimly seen from the Island of the Wild Rocks. Giles had been a wild lad, and held himself, as all his people had done, above the fishing-folk in the village at the north end. Few of them knew him well; there was only Joe Brazybone, Sculpin Joe, who from babyhood had been his humble and loving servant, and who still clung to him, until that strange affair of the marriage. To most of the villagers it seemed “all of a piece,” and “Heron doings,” when Giles brought home from some foreign port a handsome deaf-mute, a “dummy,” as a wife. Joe would have been her servant, too, gladly enough; but, when he came shambling along the rocks to make his first visit, the young woman turned and ran from him; and Giles laughed, and told him he would best keep away for a time. Poor Joe did not come again.