As the time approached for Martin’s return our childishness increased, and on the last day of all we carried on such a game together as must have made the very Saints themselves look down on us and laugh.

Before I opened my eyes in the morning I was saying to myself, “Now they’re on their way to Euston,” and every time I heard the clock strike I was thinking, “Now they’re in the train,” or “Now they’re at Liverpool,” or “Now they’re on the steamer”; but all the while I sang “Sally” and other nonsense, and pretended to be as happy as the day was long.

Christian Ann was even more excited than myself; and though she was always reproving me for my nervousness and telling me to be composed, I saw her put the kettle instead of the tea-pot on to the tablecloth, and the porridge-stick into the fire in place of the tongs.

Towards evening, when Martin was due, I had reduced myself to such a state of weakness that Christian Ann wanted to put me to bed; but sitting down in the chiollagh, and watching the road from the imprisonment of the “elbow-chair,” I saw at last the two big white eyes of the automobile wheeling round in the dusk by the gate of my father’s house.

A few minutes afterwards Martin came sweeping into the kitchen with a nice-looking nurse behind him, carrying my darling at her breast.

She was asleep, but the light of the fire soon wakened her, and then a strange thing happened.

I had risen from my seat, and Christian Ann had come hurrying up, and we two women were standing about baby, both ready to clutch at her, when she blinked her blue eyes and looked at us, and then held out her arms to her grandmother!

That nearly broke my heart for a moment (though now I thank the Lord for it), but it raised Christian Ann into the seventh heaven of rapture.

“Did you see that now?” she cried, clasping my baby to her bosom—­her eyes glistening as with sunshine, though her cheeks were slushed as with rain.

I got my treasure to myself at last (Christian Ann having to show the nurse up to her bedroom), and then, being alone with Martin, I did not care, in the intoxication of my happiness, how silly I was in my praise of her.

“Isn’t she a little fairy, a little angel, a little cherub?” I cried.  “And that nasty, nasty birthmark quite, quite gone.”

The ugly word had slipped out unawares, but Martin had caught it, and though I tried to make light of it, he gave me no peace until I had told him what it meant—­with all the humiliating story of my last night at Castle Raa and the blow my husband had struck me.

“But that’s all over now,” I said.

“Is it?  By the Lord God I swear it isn’t, though!” said Martin, and his face was so fierce that it made me afraid.

But just at that moment Christian Ann came downstairs, and the old doctor returned from his rounds, and then Tommy the Mate looked in on his way to the “Plough,” and hinting at my going to church again some day, gave it as his opinion that if I put the “boght mulish” under my “perricut” (our old island custom for legitimising children) “the Bishop himself couldn’t say nothin’ against it"-at which Martin laughed so much that I thought he had forgotten his vow about my husband.