s put at his head by the fishermen. But for a long
time there was a talk that the man had gone to meet his death gladly,
had for some reason or another preferred death to life; but people
were never quite sure if there was anything in it.

The Islanders had looked askance at Ellen Daly, Con's wife, before
that, though to her husband she was the apple of his eye. She had been
a domestic servant on the mainland when Con Daly met and married her,
and she had never seemed to have any friends. She had been handsome in
her day, at least so some people thought, but there were women on the
Island who said they never could abide her, with her pale face and
sneering smile, and her eyes that turned green as a cat's when she was
angry. However, she never tried to ingratiate herself with the women:
if the men admired her it was as much as she asked. When she liked she
could be fascinating enough. She bewitched Mrs. Wilkinson, the
housekeeper at the Hall, into taking her on whenever his Lordship
filled the house with gentlemen and an extra hand was needed. She was
deft and clever, and could be insinuating when it served her purpose.
But the friendship of the Island women she had never desired, and when
her husband was drowned there was not a fisher-wife to go and sit with
her in the desolate house. As the years went by her good looks went
with them. She yellowed, and her malevolent eyes took on red rims
round their greenness; while her dry lips, parted over her snarling
teeth, were more ill than they had been when they were ripe and ruddy.

The neighbours were kind by stealth to Con's girsha. Those were long
days of her childhood when her mother was at work in the Hall, and
the child was locked in the empty cottage; but many was the kind word
through the window, from the women as they passed up and down, and now
and again a hot griddle-cake, or some little dainty of the kind, was
passed through to the child as she sat so dull and lonely on her
little creepy stool.

Poor little Mauryeen! She was a child with social instincts, and
often, often she used to wonder in those lonely hours why she might
not be out with the other children, playing at shop in the crevices of
the rocks, or wading for cockles, or dancing round in a ring to the
sing-song of 'Green Gravel,' or playing at 'High Gates.' Her mother
coldly discouraged any friendship with the children of her foes; and
little Mauryeen grew up a silent child, with something more delica