myself, and sometimes I've been thinking I would
speak to Martin. I didn't dare do it, though. But when I heard last
night that you had come home to see your father, I said: 'Doctor, I'll
go over and speak to herself.' 'You'll never do that, Christian Ann,'
said the doctor. 'Yes, I will,' I said. 'I'll speak to the young
mistress herself. She may be a great lady now, but haven't I nursed her
on my knee? She'll never do anything to harm my boy, if I ask her not
to. No indeed she won't. Not Mary O'Neill. I'll never believe it of her.
Never in this world.'"

The sweet old face was beaming but it was wet with tears, too, and while
trying to get out her pocket-handkerchief, she was fumbling with the
flowers which she was still holding and passing from hand to hand.

"Let me take the roses," I said as well as I could, for I could scarcely
say anything.

"I brought them for you," she said, and then she laughed, a little
confusedly, at her own forgetfulness.

"To be sure they're nothing to the green-house ones you'll have at the
Castle, but I thought you'd like them for all that. They're from the
tree outside the window of your own little room. We call it your room
still--the one you slept in when you came in your little velvet frock
and pinnie, singing carols to my door. 'Mary O'Neill's room,' Martin
called it then, and it's been the same to us ever since."

This touched me so deeply that, before I knew what I was doing, I was
putting my arm about her waist and asking her to tell me what she wished
me to do and I would do it.

"Will you, though?" she said, and then one by one she propounded the
artless little schemes she had concocted to cure Martin of what she
conceived to be his love for me.

Her first thought was that I might make excuse of my father's illness to
remain where I was until the time came for Martin to leave the island;
but she repented of this almost immediately, remembering that Martin was
set on seeing me, ('I _must_ see her,' he had said) and if he did not
see me he would be so downhearted.

Then she thought I might praise up my husband to Martin, saying what a
fine man he was to be sure, and how good he had been to me, and what a
proud woman I was to be married to him; but she was ashamed of that
almost as soon as she had said it, for it might not be true, and Martin
might see I was pretending.

Finally, she suggested that in order to create a coolness between Martin
and myself I might try not