shion never suited
her, however the bonnets were worn, whether hanging down the neck or
slouched over the forehead, rising spoon-shaped toward the sky, or lying
like a flat plate on the crown. Julia's bonnet always looked as if it
had been made for somebody else. She was fond of wearing a shawl, which
hung ungracefully about her, and made her figure look squarer and her
shoulders higher than they really were. Her face struck sharply upon my
brain, as if I had never seen it distinctly before; not a bad face, but
unmistakably plain, and just now with a frown upon it, and her heavy
eyebrows knitted forbiddingly. A pretty little basket was in her hand,
and her mind was full of the bargains she was bent upon. She was even
more surprised and startled by our encounter than I was, and her manner,
when taken by surprise, was apt to be abrupt.

"Why, Martin!" she ejaculated.

"Well, Julia!" I said.

We stood looking at one another much in the same way as we used to do
years before, when she had detected me in some boyish prank, and assumed
the mentor while I felt a culprit. How really I felt a culprit at that
moment she could not guess.

"I told you just how it would be," she said, in her mentor voice. "I
knew there was a storm coming, and I begged and entreated of you not to
go. Your mother has been ill all the week, and your father has been as
cross as--as--"

"As two sticks," I suggested, precisely as I might have done when I was
thirteen.

"It is nothing to laugh at," said Julia, severely. "I shall say nothing
about myself and my own feelings, though they have been most acute, the
wind blowing a hurricane for twenty-four hours together, and we not sure
that you had even reached Sark in safety. Your mother and I wanted to
charter the Rescue, and send her over to fetch you home as soon as the
worst of the storm was over, but my uncle pooh-poohed it."

"I am very glad he did," I replied, involuntarily.

"He said you would be more than ready to come back in the first cutter
that sailed," she went on. "I suppose you have just come in?"

"Yes," I said, "and I'm half numbed with cold, and nearly famished with
hunger. You don't give me as good a welcome as the Prodigal Son got,
Julia."

"No," she answered, softening a little; "but I'm not sorry to see you
safe again. I would turn back with you, but I like to do the marketing
myself, for the servants will buy any thing. Martin, a whole cartload of
our furniture is come in