imprisonment of the "elbow-chair," I saw at last the two big white eyes
of the automobile wheeling round in the dusk by the gate of my father's
house.

A few minutes afterwards Martin came sweeping into the kitchen with a
nice-looking nurse behind him, carrying my darling at her breast.

She was asleep, but the light of the fire soon wakened her, and then a
strange thing happened.

I had risen from my seat, and Christian Ann had come hurrying up, and we
two women were standing about baby, both ready to clutch at her, when
she blinked her blue eyes and looked at us, and then held out her arms
to her grandmother!

That nearly broke my heart for a moment (though now I thank the Lord for
it), but it raised Christian Ann into the seventh heaven of rapture.

"Did you see that now?" she cried, clasping my baby to her bosom--her
eyes glistening as with sunshine, though her cheeks were slushed as with
rain.

I got my treasure to myself at last (Christian Ann having to show the
nurse up to her bedroom), and then, being alone with Martin, I did not
care, in the intoxication of my happiness, how silly I was in my praise
of her.

"Isn't she a little fairy, a little angel, a little cherub?" I cried.
"And that nasty, nasty birthmark quite, quite gone."

The ugly word had slipped out unawares, but Martin had caught it, and
though I tried to make light of it, he gave me no peace until I had told
him what it meant--with all the humiliating story of my last night at
Castle Raa and the blow my husband had struck me.

"But that's all over now," I said.

"Is it? By the Lord God I swear it isn't, though!" said Martin, and his
face was so fierce that it made me afraid.

But just at that moment Christian Ann came downstairs, and the old
doctor returned from his rounds, and then Tommy the Mate looked in on
his way to the "Plough," and hinting at my going to church again some
day, gave it as his opinion that if I put the "boght mulish" under my
"perricut" (our old island custom for legitimising children) "the Bishop
himself couldn't say nothin' against it"-at which Martin laughed so much
that I thought he had forgotten his vow about my husband.

MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD

I hadn't, though.

The brute! The bully! When my darling told me that story (I had to drag
it out of her) I felt that if I had been within a hundred miles at the
time, and had had to crawl home to the man on my hands and knees, there
wouldn't have been en