vering with cold. When I had put out the
light I noticed that the moon, which was near the full, had a big yellow
ring of luminous vapour around it.

THIRTIETH CHAPTER

My sleep that night was much troubled by dreams. It was the same dream
as before, again and again repeated--the dream of frozen regions and of
the great ice barrier, and then of the broken pen.

When I awoke in the hazy light of the dawn I thought of what the Pope
had said about beginning my wedding-day with penance and communion, so I
rose at once to go to church.

The dawn was broadening, but the household was still asleep, only the
servants in the kitchen stirring when I stepped through a side door, and
set out across the fields.

The dew was thick on the grass, and under the gloom of a heavy sky the
day looked cold and cheerless. A wind from the south-east had risen
during the night, the sea was white with breakers, and from St. Mary's
Rock there came the far-off moaning of surging waves.

The church, too, when I reached it, looked empty and chill. The
sacristan in the dim choir was arranging lilies and marguerites about
the high altar, and only one poor woman, with a little red and black
shawl over her head and shoulders, was kneeling in the side chapel where
Father Dan was saying Mass, with a sleepy little boy in clogs to serve
him.

The woman was quite young, almost as young as myself, but she was
already a widow, having lately lost her husband "at the herrings"
somewhere up by Stornoway, where he had gone down in a gale, leaving her
with one child, a year old, and another soon to come.

All this she told me the moment I knelt near her. The poor thing seemed
to think I ought to have remembered her, for she had been at school with
me in the village.

"I'm Bella Quark that was," she whispered. "I married Willie Shimmin of
the Lhen, you recollect. It's only a month this morning since he was
lost, but it seems like years and years. There isn't nothing in the
world like it."

She knew about my marriage, and said she wished me joy, though the world
was "so dark and lonely for some." Then she said something about her
"lil Willie." She had left him asleep in her cottage on the Curragh, and
he might awake and cry before she got back, so she hoped Father Dan
wouldn't keep her long.

I was so touched by the poor thing's trouble that I almost forgot my
own, and creeping up to her side I put my arm through hers as we knelt
together, and