her's visit, so I said the rumour had
reached my father that I intended to enter a convent, and he had
declared that, if I did so, he would claim my child from Christian Ann,
being its nearest blood relation.

"Can he do so--when I am . . . when we are gone?" I asked.

I thought Martin's strong face looked sterner than I had ever seen it.
He made a vague reply and left me soon afterwards on some sort of
excuse.

About an hour later he came back to carry me upstairs, and just as he
was setting me down, and Christian Ann was coming in with the candles,
he whispered:

"Don't worry about Girlie. I've settled that matter, I'm thinking."

What has he done, I wonder?

MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD

What I had done is easily told. I had gone straight to Daniel O'Neill
himself, intending to know the truth of the story and to act
accordingly.

Already I knew enough to scent mischief. I could not be so stupefied
into blindness of what was going on under my eyes as not to see that the
dirty question of money, and perhaps the dirtier question of the aims
and expectations of the woman MacLeod, were at the root of the matter
that was distressing my darling.

Daniel O'Neill had left the Big House and gone to live in his mother's
old cottage for two reasons--first, to delude the law into the idea that
he was himself utterly ruined by the bankruptcy to which he had brought
the whole island; and next, to gratify the greed of his mistress, who
wanted to get him to herself at the end, so that he might be persuaded
to marry her (if it were only on his death-bed) and so establish,
against any claim of his daughter's, her widow's rights in what a
husband leaves behind him--which is half of everything in Ellan.

What connection this had with the man's desire to get hold of the child
I had yet to learn; but I meant to learn it without another hour's
delay, so I set off for the cottage on the curragh.

It was growing dark, and not being sure of my way through the
ever-changing bypaths of the bog land, I called on Father Dan to guide
me. The old priest seemed to know my errand (the matter my darling had
communicated as a secret being common knowledge), and at first he looked
afraid.

"Well . . . yes, yes . . . why shouldn't I?" he said, and then, "Yes, I
will, I will"--with the air of a man who had made up his mind to a
daring enterprise.

Our curragh is a stretch of wild marsh lying over against the sea,
undrained, only partly c