ms of weeping, and fell
over her husband's breast and kissed and kissed him.

For once her kisses had no response. The man was dying miserably, for he
was thinking of her and of the boy. Sometimes he babbled over Philip in
a soft, inarticulate gurgle; sometimes he looked up at his wife's face
with a stony stare, and then he clung the closer to the boy, as if he
would never let him go. The dark hour came, and still he held the boy in
his arms. They had to release the child at last from his father's dying
grip.

The dead of the night was gone by this time, and the day was at the
point of dawn; the sparrows in the eaves were twittering, and the tide,
which was at its lowest ebb, was heaving on the sand far out in the bay
with the sound as of a rookery awakening. Philip remembered afterwards
that his mother cried so much that he was afraid, and that when he
had been dressed she took him downstairs, where they all ate breakfast
together, with the sun shining through the blinds.

The mother did not live to overshadow her son's life. Sinking yet lower
in habits of intemperance, she stayed indoors from week-end to week-end,
seated herself like a weeping willow by the fireside, and drank and
drank. Her excesses led to delusions. She saw ghosts perpetually. To
avoid such of them as haunted the death-room of her husband, she had
a bed made up on a couch in the parlour, and one morning she was found
face downwards stretched out beside it on the floor.

Then Philip's father's cousin, always called his Aunty Nan, came to
Ballure House to bring him up. His father had been her favourite cousin,
and, in spite of all that had happened, he had been her lifelong hero
also. A deep and secret tenderness, too timid to be quite aware of
itself, had been lying in ambush in her heart through all the years
of his miserable life with Mona. At the death of the old Deemster, her
other cousin, Peter, had married and cast her off. But she was always
one of those woodland herbs which are said to give out their sweetest
fragrance after they have been trodden on and crushed. Philip's father
had been her hero, her lost one and her love, and Philip was his
father's son.

III.

Little curly Pete, with the broad, bare feet, the tousled black head,
the jacket half way up his back like a waistcoat with sleeves, and the
hole in his trousers where the tail of his shirt should have been, was
Peter Quilliam, and he was the natural son of Peter Christi