The Treasure of the Isle of Mist

The Student and Fiona lived in a little gray house on the shores of a gray sea-loch in the Isle of Mist. The Student was a thin man with a stoop to his shoulders, which old Anne MacDermott said came of reading books; but really it was because he had been educated at a place where this is expected of you. Fiona, when she was doing nothing else, used to help Anne to keep house, rather jerkily, in the way a learned man may be supposed to like. She was a long-legged creature of fifteen, who laughed when her father threatened her with school on the mainland, and she had a warm heart and a largish size in shoes. Sometimes they had dinner; sometimes nobody remembered in time, and they had sunset and salt herrings, with a bowl of glorious yellow corn-daisies to catch the sunset.

It was Anne who saw the old hawker crossing the field behind the house, and burst in on the bookroom to inform the Student that he wanted buttons. She was met by a patient remonstrance on her ambiguous use of language:

"For," said the Student, "if you mean that buttons are lacking to me, there may be something to be said for you; but if you mean that I desire buttons, then indeed I do not desire buttons; I desire . . ."