covered her eyes with her hands.
'Did you come for my blessing?' gasped the old woman. 'It is liker my
curse you'd take with you. But I promised Tom long ago that I would
not curse you. Go then. And I praise God that Larry will soon give me
an honest daughter instead of you, my shame this many a year.'

That was the last meeting of mother and daughter. They say Alister is
a devoted husband, but he comes no more to the Island. He has changed
out of his old boat, and his late shipmates say vaguely that he has
removed somewhere Sunderland or Cardiff way, and trades to the North
Sea. Tom is very reticent about Maggie, though Miss Bell, the
postmistress, might tell, if she were not a superior person, and as
used to keeping a secret at a pinch as Father Tiernay himself, how
many letters he receives with the post-mark of a well-known seaport
town.

Poor Maggie! Said I not that in the Island the way of transgressors is
hard?

IV

A RICH WOMAN

Margret Laffan was something of a mystery to the Island people. Long
ago in comparative youth she had disappeared for a half-dozen years.
Then she had turned up one day in a coarse dress of blue and white
check, which looked suspiciously like workhouse or asylum garb, and
had greeted such of the neighbours as she knew with a nod, for all the
world as if she had seen them yesterday. It happened that the henwife
at the Hall had been buried a day or two earlier, and when Margret
came asking a place from Mrs. Wilkinson, the lord's housekeeper, the
position was yet unfilled and Margret got it.

Not every one would have cared for the post. Only a misanthropic
person indeed would have been satisfied with it. The henwife's
cottage and the poultry settlement might have been many miles from a
human habitation, so lonely were they. They were in a glen of red
sandstone, and half the wood lay between them and the Hall. The great
red walls stood so high round the glen that you could not even hear
the sea calling. As for the village, it was a long way below. You had
to go down a steep path from the glen before you came to an open
space, where you could see the reek of the chimneys under you. Every
morning Margret brought the eggs and the trussed chickens to the Hall.
But no one disturbed her solitude, except when the deer, or the wild
little red cattle came gazing curiously through the netting at Margret
and her charges. There, for twenty-seven years, Margret lived with no
company but t