st unheard of that a woman should fall away from it.
Purity is the unquestioned prerogative of every Island girl or woman,
and it only comes to them as a vague far-off horror in an unknown
world that there are places under the sun and the stars where such is
not the case. The punishment is appalling in the very few cases where
sin has lifted its head amongst these austere people. The lepers' hut
of old was no such living death of isolation as surrounds an Island
girl who has smirched her good name. Henceforth there is an atmosphere
about her that never lifts--of horror for some, of tragedy for
others, according to their temperament. There she stands lonely for
all her days, with the seal set upon her that can never be broken, the
consecration of an awful and tragic destiny.

I knew of such an one who was little more than a child when this
horror befell her. She has dark blue eyes and thick black lashes, and
very white skin. The soft dark hair comes low on her white forehead.
With a gaily-coloured shawl covering her head, and drawn across her
chin, as they wear it in the Island, she looks, or looked when I last
saw her, a hidden, gliding image of modesty. And despite that sin of
the past she is modest. It was the ignorant sin of a child, and out of
the days of horror and wrath that followed--her purging--she brought
only the maternity that burns like a white flame in her. The virtuous
were more wroth against her in old days that she carried her maternity
so proudly. Why, not the most honourable and cherished of the young
Island mothers dandled her child with such pride. No mother of a young
earl could have stepped lighter, and held her head higher, than
Maggie when she came down the fishing street, spurning the very
stones, as it seemed, so lightly she went with the baby wrapped in her
shawl. She did not seem to notice that some of the kindly neighbours
stepped aside, or that here and there a woman pulled her little
daughter within doors, out of the path of the unlawful mother. Those
little pink fingers pushed away shame and contempt. The child was her
world.

She was the daughter of a fisherman who died of a chest complaint soon
after she was born. Her mother still lives, a hard-featured honest old
woman, with a network of fine lines about her puckered eyes. Her hair
went quite white the year her daughter's child was born, but I
remember it dark and abundant with only a silver thread glistening
here and there. She has