“There now, doctor?  What was I telling you?  Once they’ve been away, it’s witched they are—­longing and longing to go back again.  What’s there in London that’s wanting him?”

Whereupon the doctor (thinking of the knighthood), with a proud lift of his old head and a wink at Father Dan, said: 

“Who knows?  Perhaps it’s the King that’s wanting him, woman.”

“The King?” cried Christian Ann.  “He’s got a bonny son of his own, they’re telling me, so what for should he be wanting mine?”

“Mary,” said.  Martin, as soon as he could speak for laughing, “do you want a mother?  I’ve got one to sell, and I wouldn’t trust but I might give her away.”

“Cuff him, Mrs. Conrad,” cried Father Dan.  “Cuff him, the young rascal!  He may be a big man in the great world over the water, but he mustn’t come here expecting his mother and his old priest to worship him.”

How we laughed!  I laughed until I cried, not knowing which I was doing most, but feeling as if I had never had an ache or a care in all my life before.

Breakfast being over, the men going into the garden to smoke, and Sister Mildred insisting on clearing the table, Christian Ann took up her knitting, sat by my side, and told me the “newses” of home—­sad news, most of it, about my father, God pity him, and how his great schemes for “galvanising the old island into life” had gone down to failure and fatuity, sending some to the asylum and some to the graveyard, and certain of the managers of corporations and banks to gaol.

My father himself had escaped prosecution; but he was supposed to be a ruined man, dying of cancer, and had gone to live in his mother’s old cottage on the curragh, with only Nessy MacLeod to care for him—­having left the Big House to Aunt Bridget and cousin Betsy, who declared (so I gathered or guessed) that I had disgraced their name and should never look on their faces again.

“But dear heart alive, that won’t cut much ice, will it?” said Christian Ann, catching a word of Martin’s.

Later in the day, being alone with the old doctor.  I heard something of my husband also—­that he had applied (according to the laws of Ellan) for an Act of Divorce, and that our insular legislature was likely to grant it.

Still later, having walked out into the garden, where the bluebells were in bloom, I, too, heard the sneck of the gate, and it was old Tommy again, who (having been up to the “Plough” to “put a sight on himself”) had come round to welcome me as well—­a little older, a little feebler, “tacking a bit,” as he said, with “romps in his fetlock joints,” but feeling “well tremenjus.”

He had brought the “full of his coat-pockets” of lobsters and crabs for me ("wonderful good for invalids, missie”) and the “full of his mouth” of the doings at Castle Raa, which he had left immediately after myself—­Price also, neither of them being willing to stay with a master who had “the rough word” for everybody, and a “misthress” who had “the black curse on her” that would “carry her naked sowl to hell.”