ere her nights had no repose and her days
no freshness, to get back a little of the color of the sun into her
pallid cheeks, and driving one day from Mount Murray to Government
House she lit on Greeba in the road outside Castletown. It was
summer, and the little maid of eight, bright as the sunlight that
glistened on her head, her cheeks all pink and white, her eyes
sparkling under her dark lashes, her brown hair rippling behind her,
her frock tucked up in fishwife fashion, her legs bare, and her white
linen sunbonnet swinging in her hand, was chasing a butterfly amid
the yellow-tipped gorse that grew by the roadside. That vision of
beauty and health awakened a memory of less charm and freshness. The
Duchess remembered a little maiden of her own who was also eight
years old, dainty and pretty, but pale and sickly, peaked up in a
chill stone house in London, playing alone with bows and ribbons,
talking to herself, and having no companion except a fidgety French
governess, who was wrinkled and had lost some of her teeth.

A few days later the Duchess came again to Government House, bought a
gay new hat for Greeba, and proposed that the little maid should go
home with her as playfellow for her only child. Adam promptly said
"No" to her proposal, with what emphasis his courtesy would permit,
urging that Greeba, being so much younger than her brothers, was like
an only child in the family, and that she was in any case an only
daughter. But Adam's wife, thinking she saw her opportunity, found
many reasons why Greeba should be allowed to go. For would it be
right to cross the wish of so great a lady?--and one, too, who was in
a sense their mistress also. And then who could say what the Duchess
might do for the child some day?--and in any event wasn't it a chance
for which any body else in the island would give both his ears to
have his daughter brought up in London, and at the great house of the
Duke of Athol?

The end of it was that Adam yielded to his wife now, as he had often
yielded before. "But I'll sadly miss my little lassie," he said, "and
I much misdoubt but I'll repent me of letting her go."

Yet, while Adam shook his head and looked troubled, the little maid
herself was in an ecstasy of delight.

"And would you really like to go to London, Greeba ven?"

"But should I see the carriages, and the ladies on horseback, and the
shops, and the little girls in velvet--should I, eh?"

"Maybe so, my ven, maybe so."