come
between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no.
What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and
divorce-making co-respondent. They call it Education.

Davy Quiggin was born in a mud house on the shore, near the old
church at Ballaugh. The house had one room only, and it had been the
living-room, sleeping-room, birth-room, and death-room of a family of
six. Davy, who was the youngest, saw them all out. The last to go were
his mother and his grandfather. They lay ill at the same time, and died
on the one day. The old man died first, and Davy fixed up a herring-net
in front of him, where he lay on the settle by the fire, so that his
mother might not see him from her place on the bed.

Not long after that, Davy, who was fifteen years of age, went to live as
farm lad with Kinvig, of Ballavolley. Kinvig was a solemn person, very
stiff and starchy, and sententious in his way, a mighty man among the
Methodists, and a power in the pulpit. He thought he had done an act of
charity when he took Davy into his home, and Davy repaid him in due time
by falling in love with Nelly, his daughter.

When that happened Davy never quite knew. "That's the way of it," he
used to say. "A girl slips in, and there ye are." Nelly was in to a
certainty when one night Davy came home late from the club meeting on
the street, and rapped at the kitchen window. That was the signal of the
home circle that some member of it was waiting at the door. Now there
are ways and ways of rapping at a kitchen window. There is the pit-a-pat
of a light heart, and the thud-thud of a heavy one; and there is the
sharp crack-crack of haste, and the dithering que-we-we of fear. Davy
had a rap of his own, and Nelly knew it.

There was a sort of a trip and dance and a rum-tum-tum in Davy's rap
that always made Nelly's heart and feet leap up at the same instant. But
on this unlucky night it was Nelly's mother who heard it, and opened the
door. What happened then was like the dismal sneck of the outside gate
to Davy for ten years thereafter. The porch was dark, and so was the
little square lobby behind the door. On numerous other nights that had
been an advantage in Davy's eyes, but on this occasion he thought it a
snare of the evil one. Seeing something white in a petticoat he thew his
arms about it and kissed and hugged it madly. It struck him at the time
as strange that the arms he held did not clout him under the chin,