wanted to know if he
wasn't "freckened" to be there, "not being used of Kings," whereupon he
cried:

"What! Frightened of another man--and a stunning good one, too!"

And then came a story of how the King had asked if he hadn't been in
fear of icebergs, and how he had answered No, you could strike more of
them in a day in London (meaning icy-hearted people) than in a life-time
in the Antarctic.

I suppose I must have laughed at that, for the next I heard was:

"Hush! Isn't that Mary!"

"Aw, yes, the poor _veg veen_," said a sad voice. It was Christian
Ann's. At the bottom of her heart I shall always be the child who "sang
carvals to her door."

What a wonderful day! I shall not sleep a wink to-night, though.
To-morrow I must tell him.

* * * * *

JULY 13. I intended to tell Martin this morning, but I really couldn't.

I was going downstairs to breakfast, holding on to the bannisters at one
side and using nurse's shoulder as my other crutch, when I saw the
brightest picture I have ever beheld. Baby and Martin were on hands and
knees on the rag-work hearthrug, face to face--Martin calling her to
come, Isabel lifting up her little head to him, like a fledgling in a
nest, and both laughing with that gurgling sound as of water bubbling
out of a bottle.

This sight broke all the breath out of me at the very first moment. And
when Martin, after putting me into my place in the _chiollagh_, plunged
immediately into a rapturous account of his preparations for our
departure--how we were to be married by special license at the High
Bailiff's on the tenth (if that date would do), how I was to rest a day
and then travel up to London on the twelfth, and then rest other four
days (during which warm clothes could be bought for me), and sail by the
_Orient_ on the sixteenth--I could not find it in my heart to tell him
then of the inexorable fate that confronted us.

It was cowardice, I knew, and sooner or later I should have to pay for
it. But when he went on to talk about baby, and appealed to his mother
to say if she wouldn't look after Girlie when I was gone, and Christian
Ann (in such a different tone) said Yes, she would look after Girlie
when I was gone, I decided that I dared not tell him at all--I would die
rather than do so.

The end of it all is that I have arranged with Christian Ann, the old
doctor, and Father Dan that Time and Martin's own observation are to
tell him what is go