“He’ll find somebody else—­that’s what he’ll do.  Serve you right, too.  You’ll only have yourself to blame for it.  Perhaps you think you’ll be able to do the same, but you won’t.  Women can’t.  He’ll be happy enough, and you’ll be the only one to suffer, so don’t make a fool of yourself.  Accept the situation.  You may not like your husband too much.  I can’t say I liked the Colonel particularly.  He took snuff, and no woman in the world could keep him in clean pocket handkerchiefs.  But when a sensible person has got something at stake, she puts up with things.  And that’s what you must do.  He who wants fresh eggs must raise his own chickens, you know.”

Aunt Bridget ran on for some time longer, telling me of my father’s anger, which was not a matter for much surprise, seeing how he had built himself upon my marriage, and how he had expected that I should have a child, a son, to carry on the family.

“Do you mean to disappoint him after all he has done for you?  It would be too silly, too stupid.  You’d be the laughing-stock of the whole island.  So get up and get dressed and be ready and willing to go with his lordship when he sails by this afternoon’s steamer.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can’t?  You mean you won’t?”

“Very well, Auntie, I won’t.”

At that Aunt Bridget stormed at me for several minutes, telling me that if my stubborn determination not to leave the island with my husband meant that I intended to return home she might inform me at once that I was not wanted there and I need not come.

“I’ve enough on my hands in that house already, what with Betsy unmarried, and your father doing nothing for her, and that nasty Nessy MacLeod making up to him.  You ungrateful minx!  You are ruining everything!  After all I’ve done for you too!  But no matter!  If you will make your bed I shall take care that you lie on it.”

With that, and the peak of her half-moon bonnet almost dancing over her angry face, Aunt Bridget flounced out of my room.

Half an hour afterwards, when I went into the sitting-room, I found my father’s advocate, Mr. Curphy, waiting for me.  He looked down at me with an indulgent and significant smile, which brought the colour rushing back to my face, put me to sit by his side, touched my arm with one of his large white clammy hands, stroked his long brown beard with the other, and then in the half-reproving tone which a Sunday-school teacher might have used to a wayward child, he began to tell me what the consequences would be if I persisted in my present conduct.

They would be serious.  The law was very clear on marital rights.  If a wife refused to live with her husband, except on a plea of cruelty or something equally plausible, he could apply to the court and compel her to do so; and if she declined, if she removed herself from his abode, or having removed, refused to return, the Court might punish her—­it might even imprison her.