re you realize what it means to you?" I began
urging, because I knew that I would soon have to play my trump card.
"Here you are, a grayhead at thirty-five, without a thing in life but
that farm, and you--heavens, Mac, don't you know that you are one of
the greatest Greek scholars in the world? Don't you think you owe the
world something? What are you giving? Nothing! You have suppressed
even the knowledge of what you are from the people around you. You get
a curt nod from the head of a little college. These people call you
Alec, when the whole world wants to call you Master. You are doing
work that any farm hand could do, when you ought to be doing work that
no one can do as well as yourself. Is this a square deal for other
people, Mac? Were you not given obligations as well as gifts?"

"Yes, Bruce." Mac said it sadly. "There's the rub. I was given
obligations as well as gifts, and I am taking you home with me now,
instead of threshing this out in the hotel at Charlottetown, because I
want you and you alone to realize that I am not just a stubborn
Islander. And there is home."

He pointed to a cottage in the field. The cottage was back from the
road nearly a quarter of a mile. Mac opened the gate, led the horse
through it, closed it again and climbed back into the buggy beside me.
There were tears in his brown eyes.

"Is every one well?" said Mac hesitatingly. "Is everybody well--I mean
of the people I knew best back there?" he asked. I knew what he meant.

"Yes, Mac, _she_ is well," I said, "and I know she is waiting."

I had played my "trump card," but Mac was silent.

The farm was typical of the Island. The kitchen door opened directly
on the farmyard, and around it, at the moment, were gathered turkeys,
ducks, geese and chickens. Mac brought me to a little gate in the
flower-garden fence, and, passing through it, we walked along the
pathway before the house, so that I could enter through the front door
and be received in the "front room." Island opposition to affectation
or "putting on," as the people say, forbade calling this "front room"
a parlor. No one would think of doing such a thing, unless he was
already well along the way to "aristocracy." One dare not violate the
unwritten Island law to keep natural and plain.

I noticed that when Mac spoke to me he used the cultured accents of
the old college; but before others he spoke as the Islanders
spoke--good English, better English than that of the farmers