been
watching the road for Martin (he had refused to occupy the old people's
bedroom after all and had put up at the "Plough"), came in, saying:

"The boy's late, mother--what's doing on him, I wonder?"

We waited awhile longer, and then sat down to breakfast. Oh, the homely
beauty of that morning meal, with its porridge, its milk, its honey and
cakes, its butter like gold, and its eggs like cream!

In spite of Sister Mildred's protests Christian Ann stood and served,
and I will not say that for me there was not a startling delight in
being waited upon once more, being asked what I would like, and getting
it, giving orders and being obeyed--me, me, me!

At length in the exercise of my authority I insisted on Christian Ann
sitting down too, which she did, though she didn't eat, but went on
talking in her dear, simple, delicious way.

It was always about Martin, and the best of it was about her beautiful
faith that he was still alive when the report came that he had been lost
at sea.

What? Her son dying like that, and she old and the sun going down on
her? Never! Newspapers? Chut, who cared what people put in the papers?
If Martin had really been lost, wouldn't _she_ have known it--having
borne him on her bosom ("a middling hard birth, too"), and being the
first to hear his living voice in the world?

So while people thought she was growing "weak in her intellects," she
had clung to the belief that her beloved son would come back to her. And
behold! one dark night in winter, when she was sitting in the
_chiollagh_ alone, and the wind was loud in the trees, and the doctor
upstairs was calling on her to come to bed ("you're wearing yourself
away, woman"), she heard a sneck of the garden gate and a step on the
gravel path, and it was old Tommy the Mate, who without waiting for her
to open the door let a great yell out of him through the window that a
"talegraf" had come to say her boy was safe.

Father Dan looked in after mass, in his biretta and faded cassock (the
same, I do declare, that he had worn when I was a child), and then
Martin himself came swinging up, with his big voice, like a shout from
the quarter-deck.

"Helloa! Stunning morning, isn't it?"

It was perfectly delightful to see the way he treated his mother, though
there was not too much reverence in his teasing, and hardly more love
than license.

When she told him to sit down if he had not forgotten the house, and
said she hoped he had finishe