told herself once or twice that her husband had forgotten
her, she told herself a score of times that do what he would he
should yet be hers, hers only, and no other woman's in all the wide
world. Then she thought, "How foolish! Who is there to take him from
me? Why, no one."

About the same time she heard Sunlocks question the priest concerning
her, asking what the mother of little Michael was like to look upon.
And the priest answered that if the eyes of an old curmudgeon like
himself could see straight, she was comely beyond her grade in life,
and young, too, though her brown hair had sometimes a shade of gray,
and gentle and silent, and of a soft and touching voice.

"I've heard her voice once," said Sunlocks. "And her husband was an
Icelander, and he is dead, you say?"

"Yes," said the priest; "and she's like myself in one thing."

"And what is that?" said Sunlocks.

"That she has never been able to look at anybody else," said the
priest. "And that's why she is here, you must know, burying herself
alive on old Grimsey."

"Oh," said Sunlocks, in the low murmur of the blind, "if God had but
given me this woman, so sweet, so true, so simple, instead of her--of
her--and yet--and yet----"

"Gracious heavens!" thought Greeba, "he is falling in love with me."

At that, the hot flush overspread her cheeks again, and her dark eyes
danced, and all her loveliness flowed back upon her in an instant.
And then a subtle fancy, a daring scheme, a wild adventure broke on
her heart and head, and made every nerve in her body quiver. She
would let him go on; he should think she was the other woman; she
would draw him on to love her, and one day when she held him fast and
sure, and he was hers, hers, hers only forever and ever, she would
open her arms and cry, "Sunlocks, Sunlocks, I am Greeba, Greeba!"

It was while she was in the first hot flush of this wild thought,
never doubting but the frantic thing was possible, for love knows no
impediments, that the apothecary came from Husavik, saying he was
sent by some unknown correspondent named Adam Fairbrother, who had
written from London. He examined the eyes of Michael Sunlocks by the
daylight first, but the season being the winter season, and the
daylight heavy with fog from off the sea, he asked for a candle, and
Greeba was called to hold it while he examined the eyes again. Never
before had she been so near to her husband throughout the two years
that she had lived under t