m home perhaps I had not yet
received his message. Oh yes, he was going on to the Castle to-morrow
night and would stay there until it was time to leave the island.

"I'm so glad," I said, hardly knowing with what fervour I had said it,
until I saw the same expression of fear come back to the sweet old face.

"Martin will be glad, too," she said, "and that's why I've come
to see you."

"That?"

"You won't be cross with me, will you? But Martin is so fond of
you. . . . He always has been fond of you, ever since he was a
boy . . . but this time. . . ."

"Yes?"

"This time I thought . . . I really, really thought he was too fond of
you."

I had to hold my breast to keep down the cry of joy that was rising to
my throat, but the dear soul saw nothing.

"Not that he said so--not to say said so, but it's a mother to see
things, isn't it? And he was talking and talking so much about Mary
O'Neill that I was frightened--really frightened."

"Frightened?"

"He's so tender-hearted, you see. And then you . . . you're such a
wonderful woman grown. Tommy the Mate says there hasn't been the like of
you on this island since they laid your mother under the sod. It's truth
enough, too--gospel truth. And Martin--Martin says there isn't your
equal, no, not in London itself neither. So . . . so," she said,
trembling and stammering, "I was thinking . . . I was thinking he was
only flesh and blood like the rest of us, poor boy, and if he got to be
_too_ fond of you . . . now that you're married and have a husband, you
know. . . ."

The trembling and stammering stopped her for a moment.

"They're saying you are not very happy in your marriage neither. Times
and times I've heard people saying he isn't kind to you, and they
married you against your will. . . . So I was telling myself if that's
so, and Martin and you came together now, and you encouraged him, and
let him go on and anything came of it . . . any trouble or disgrace or
the like of that . . . it would be such a terrible cruel shocking thing
for the boy . . . just when everybody's talking about him and speaking
so well too."

It was out at last. Her poor broken-hearted story was told. Being a
married woman, unhappily married, too, I was a danger to her beloved
son, and she had come to me in her sweet, unmindful, motherly
selfishness to ask me to protect him _against myself_.

"Whiles and whiles I've been thinking of it," she said. "'What will I
do?' I've been asking