s on him and on me, and I doubt
we'll ever be warm again.'

Presently they drew up at a bleak way-side station for the ferry, and
the brother and sister without a word stepped out in the night and the
snow. The man did not offer to carry the child. He knew it was no use.
But he put a strong arm round the woman and her burden, where the snow
was heaviest, and the wind from the sea blew like a hurricane.

They were the only passengers by the ferry, and neither the ferryman
nor his mate knew Mary Cassidy, with the shawl drawn over her eyes.
But as they stepped ashore and touched the familiar rock on which she
and hers for many a forgotten generation had been born and cradled,
the piteous frozen madness melted away from her face. She turned to
her brother--

'Tis the sad home-coming,' she said, 'but I've brought back all I
prized.' She snatched the ring from her finger suddenly and hurled it
out in the tossing waters, on which even in the dark they could see
the foam-crests. 'Now I'm Mary Cassidy again,' she said, 'and the
woman that left you is dead.' She lifted her shawl and kissed the
little dead face under it. 'You've no father, avic,' she said
passionately. 'You're mine, only mine. Never a man has any right in
you at all, but only Mary Cassidy.'

VI

MAURYEEN

Against Con Daly's little girl there was never a word spoken in the
Island. Con had been well liked, God rest his soul!--but the man was
drowned nigh upon twenty years ago. There was some old tragic tale
about it, how he had volunteered to swim with a rope round his waist
to a ship breaking up a few yards from the rocks in a sea that a
gannet could scarcely live upon. He had pushed aside the men who
remonstrated with him, turning on them a face ghastly in the
moonlight. 'Stand aside, men,' he cried, 'and if I fail, see to the
girsha!' He was the strongest man in all the Island, and as much at
home in the water as a porpoise. They saw his sleek head now and again
flung out of the trough of the waves, and his huge shoulders
labouring against the weight of the storm. Then suddenly the rope they
were holding fell slack in their hands,--they said afterwards it had
snapped on a jagged razor of rock,--and the man disappeared. A day or
two later his battered and bruised body was flung up on the bathing
strand, where in summer the city ladies take their dip in the sea. He
was buried with some of the drowned sailors he had tried to rescue,
and an iron cros