er, though so badly
treated," said Sunlocks.

"Well, yes," said the priest, "yes."

"You were chaplain at Reykjavik, but looking to be priest or dean,
and perhaps bishop some day?" said Sunlocks.

"Well, maybe so; such dreams come in one's youth," said the priest.

"And when you were sent to Grimsey there was nothing before you but a
cure of less than a hundred souls?" said Sunlocks.

"That is so," said the priest.

"The old story," said Sunlocks, and he drew a deep breath.

But deeper far was the breath that Greeba drew, for it seemed to be
the last gasp of her heart.

A year passed, and never once had Greeba spoken that her husband
might hear her. But if she did not speak, she listened always, and
the silence of her tongue seemed to make her ears the more keen. Thus
she found a way to meet all his wishes, and before he had asked he
was answered. If the day was cold he found gloves to his hand; if he
thought to wash there was water beside him; if he wished to write the
pen lay near his fingers. Meantime he never heard more than a light
footfall and the rustle of a dress about him, but as these sounds
awoke painful memories he listened and said nothing.

The summer had come and gone in which he could walk out by the
priest's arm, or lie by the hour within sound of a stream, and the
winter had fallen in with its short days and long nights. And once,
when the snow lay thick on the ground, Greeba heard him say how
cheerfully he might cheat time of many a weary hour of days like that
if only he had a fiddle to beguile them. At that she remembered that
it was not want of money that had placed her where she was, and
before the spring of that year a little church organ came from
Reykjavik, addressed to the priest, as a present from someone whose
name was unknown to him.

"Some guardian angel seems to hover around us," said Michael
Sunlocks, "to give us everything that we can wish for."

The joy in his blind face brought smiles into the face of Greeba, but
her heart was heavy for all that. To live within hourly sight of
love, yet never to share it, was to sit at a feast and eat nothing.
To hear his voice, yet never to answer it, to see his face, yet never
to touch it with the lips that hungered to kiss it, was an ordeal
more terrible than any woman's heart could bear. Should she not
speak? Might she not reveal herself? Not yet, not yet! But how long,
oh, how long?

In the heat of her impatience she could not qui