on the
Sundays, and, unheeding rebuffs, sent her a brooch and an apron at
Christmas. I wish I could have seen Margret's face and Mary's over
that present. It was returned to poor Fanny, with a curt intimation
that Mary had no use for it, and there the matter ended.

I once asked Mary, when I knew her well enough to take the liberty,
about that meeting between her and her mother, after the door was shut
on young Jack's and little Martin's departing footsteps. 'Well,' said
Mary, 'she looked hard at me, an' then she said, "You've grown up
yalla an' bad-lookin', but a strong girl for the work. You favour
meself, though I've a genteeler nose." And then,' said Mary, 'I turned
in an' boiled the kettle for the tay.'

The money did not even remain in the Island, for as soon as Margret
was laid in a grave in the Abbey--with a vacant space beside her, for,
said Mary, 'you couldn't tell but I'd be takin' a fancy to be buried
there myself some day,'--Mary fled in the early morning before the
neighbours were about. Mary looked on the Island where so many had
coveted her money as a 'nest of robbers,' and so she fled, with 'the
stocking' in the bosom of her gown, one morning at low tide. She
wouldn't trust the money to the post office in the Island, because her
cousin Lizzie was Miss Bell's servant. 'Divil a letther but the
priest's they don't open an' read,' she said, 'an' tells the news
afterwards to the man or woman that owns it. The news gets to them
before the letter. An' if I put the fortune in there I'm doubtin'
'twould ever see London. I know an honest man in the Whiterock post
office I'd betther be trustin'.

And that is how Margret's 'stocking' left the Island.

V

HOW MARY CAME HOME

The Island people seldom marry outside the Island. They are
passionately devoted to each other, but as a rule look coldly upon the
stranger. Swarthy Spanish sailors put in sometimes, and fair-skinned,
black-eyed Greeks, and broad-shouldered Norwegians, all as ripe for
love as any other sailor, but that they should carry away an Island
girl to their outlandish places over sea is a thing almost unheard of.
The Island girls are courted by their own blue-jerseyed
fisher-lads--and what a place for love-making, with the ravines and
caves in the cliff-sides, and the deep glens in the heart of the
Island, so lonely except for the lord's red deer and little fierce
black cattle. Why, if one of those foreign sailors attempted
love-making w