within three days. Prompt to that time she went
down to Ramsey again, but though the boat had put into harbor and
discharged its mails there was still no letter for her. The ordinary
Irish trader between Dublin and Reykjavik was expected on its
homeward trip in a week or nine days more, and Greeba's heart lay low
and waited. In due course the trader came, but no letter for her came
with it. Then her hope broke down. Sunlocks had forgotten her;
perhaps he cared for her no longer; it might even be that he loved
some one else. And so with the fall of her hope her womanly pride
arose, and she asked herself very haughtily, but with the great tears
in her big dark eyes, what it mattered to her after all. Only she was
very lonely, and so weary and heart-sick, and with no one to look to
for the cheer of life.

She was still at Lague, where her eldest brother was now sole master,
and he was very cold with her, for he had taken it with mighty high
dudgeon that a sister of his should have used the law against him.
So, feeling how bitter it was to eat the bread of another, she had
even begun to pinch herself of food, and to sit at meals but rarely.

But Jason came again about a fortnight after the trial, and he found
Greeba alone as before. She was sitting by the porch, in the cool of
the summer evening, combing out the plaits of her long brown hair,
and looking up at Barrule, that was heaving out large and black in
the sundown, with a nightcap of silver vapor over its head in the
clouds.

"I can stay away no longer," he said, with his eyes down. "I've tried
to stay away and can't, and the days creep along. So think no ill of
me if I come too soon."

Greeba made him no answer, but thought within herself that if he had
stayed a day longer he must have stayed a day too long.

"It's a weary heart I've borne," he said, "since I saw you last, and
you bade me leave you, and I obeyed, though it cost me dear. But let
that go."

Still she did not speak, and looking up into her face he saw how pale
she was, and weak and ill as he thought.

"Greeba," he cried, "what has happened?"

But she only smiled and gave him a look of kindness, and said that
nothing was amiss with her.

"Yes, by the Lord, but something is amiss," he said, with his blood
in his face in an instant. "What is it?" he cried. "What is it?"

"Only that I have not eaten much to-day," she said, "that's all."

"All!" he cried. "All!"

He seemed to understand ever