I suppose I must have laughed at that, for the next I heard was: 

“Hush!  Isn’t that Mary!”

“Aw, yes, the poor veg veen,” said a sad voice.  It was Christian Ann’s.  At the bottom of her heart I shall always be the child who “sang carvals to her door.”

What a wonderful day!  I shall not sleep a wink to-night, though.  To-morrow I must tell him.

* * * * *

JULY 13.  I intended to tell Martin this morning, but I really couldn’t.

I was going downstairs to breakfast, holding on to the bannisters at one side and using nurse’s shoulder as my other crutch, when I saw the brightest picture I have ever beheld.  Baby and Martin were on hands and knees on the rag-work hearthrug, face to face—­Martin calling her to come, Isabel lifting up her little head to him, like a fledgling in a nest, and both laughing with that gurgling sound as of water bubbling out of a bottle.

This sight broke all the breath out of me at the very first moment.  And when Martin, after putting me into my place in the chiollagh, plunged immediately into a rapturous account of his preparations for our departure—­how we were to be married by special license at the High Bailiff’s on the tenth (if that date would do), how I was to rest a day and then travel up to London on the twelfth, and then rest other four days (during which warm clothes could be bought for me), and sail by the Orient on the sixteenth—­I could not find it in my heart to tell him then of the inexorable fate that confronted us.

It was cowardice, I knew, and sooner or later I should have to pay for it.  But when he went on to talk about baby, and appealed to his mother to say if she wouldn’t look after Girlie when I was gone, and Christian Ann (in such a different tone) said Yes, she would look after Girlie when I was gone, I decided that I dared not tell him at all—­I would die rather than do so.

The end of it all is that I have arranged with Christian Ann, the old doctor, and Father Dan that Time and Martin’s own observation are to tell him what is going to happen, and none of us are to say anything about it.

What a deceiver I am, though!  I put it all down to my unselfish love for Martin.  It would be such a blow to him—­disturbing his plans, upsetting everything, perhaps causing him to postpone his Expedition, or even to abandon it altogether.  “Let the truth fall soft on him.  He’ll see it soon enough.  Don’t let us be cruel.”

The dear sweet, unsuspecting old darlings have taken it all in—­all my vain and cowardly selfishness.  I am to play the part of pretending to fall in with Martin’s plans, and they are to stand by and say nothing.

Can I do it?  I wonder, I wonder!

* * * * *

JULY 15.  I am becoming quite a great actress!  It’s astonishing to see how I develop my deceptions under all sorts of veils and disguises.