XV.

On Saturday night he was early at Sulby. The bat-room was thronged with fishermen in guernseys, sea-boots, and sou'-westers. They were all on their feet together, twisting about like great congers on the quay, drinking a little and smoking a great deal, thumping the table, and all talking at once. “How've you done, Billy?”—“Enough to keep away the divil and the coroner, and that's about all.”—“Where's Tom Dug?”—“Gone to Austrilla.”—“Is Jimmy over to-day?”—“He's away to Cleveland.”—“Gough, bless me, every Manx boy seems to be going foreign.”—“That's where we'll all be after long and last, if we don't stop these southside trawlers.”

Philip went in and was received with goodwill and rough courtesy, but no man abated a jot of his freedom of action or liberty of speech, and the thumping and shouting were as loud as before. “Appeal to the Receiver-General.”—“Chut! an ould woman with a face winking at you like a roast potato.”—“Will we go to the Bishop, then?”—“A whitewashed Methodist with a soul the size of a dried pea.”—“The Governor is the proper person,” said Philip above the hubbub, “and he is to visit Peel Castle next Saturday afternoon about the restorations. Let every Manx fisherman who thinks the trawl-boats are enemies of the fish be there that day. Then lay your complaint before the man whose duty it is to inquire into all such grievances; and if you want a spokesman, I'm ready to speak for you.”—“Bravo!”—“That's the ticket!”

Then the meeting was at an end; the men went on with stories of the week's fishing, stories of smugglers, stories of the Swaddlers (the Wesleyans), stories of the totalers (teetotallers), and Philip made for the door. When he got there, he began to reflect that, being in the house, he ought to leave good-night with Cæsar and Grannie. Hardly decent not to do so. No use hurting people's feelings. Might as well be civil. Cost nothing anyway. Thus an overpowering compulsion in the disguise of courtesy drew him again into Kate's company; but to-morrow he would take a new turn.

“Proud to see you, Mr. Philip,” said Cæsar.

“The water's playing in the kettle; make Mr. Philip a cup of tay, Nancy,” said Grannie. Cæsar was sitting back to the partition, pretending to read out of a big Bible on his knees, but listening with both ears and open mouth to the profane stories being told in the bar-room. Kate was not in the kitchen, but an open book, face downwards, lay on the chair by the turf closet.

“What's this?” said Philip. “A French exercise-book! Whoever can it belong to here?”

“Aw, Kirry, of coorse,” said Grannie, “and sticking that close to it of an everin that you haven't a chance to put a word on her.”

“Vanity, sir, vanity, all vanity,” said Cæsar; and again he listened hard.

Philip's eyes began to blink. “Teaching herself French, is she? Has she been doing it long, Grannie?”

“Long enough, sir, three years or better, since poor Pete went away maybe; and at the books for ever, grammars and tex' books, and I don't know what.”

Cæsar, with his ear at the glass, made an impatient gesture for silence, but Grannie continued, “I don't know what for people should be larning themselves foreign languages at all. For my part, there isn't one of them bates the Manx itself for plainness. And aren't we reading, when the Lord wanted to bring confusion on Noah and his disobedient sons and grandsons at going up the Tower of Babel, he made them spake different tongues?”

“Good thing too,” snapped Cæsar, “if every poor man was bound to carry his wife up with him.”

Philip's eyes were streaming, and, unobserved, he put the lesson-book to his lips. He had guessed its secret. The girl was making herself worthy of him. God bless, her!

Kate came downstairs in the dark dress and white collar of Sunday night. She saw Philip putting down the book, lowered her head and blushed, took up the volume, and smuggled it out of sight. Then Cæsar's curiosity conquered his propriety and he ventured into the bar-room, Grannie came and went between the counter and the fishermen, Nancy clicked about from dairy to door, and Kate and Philip were left alone.

“You were wrong the other night,” she said. “I have been thinking it over, and you were quite, quite wrong.”

“So?”

“If a man marries a woman beneath him, he stoops to her, and to stoop to her is to pity her, and to pity her is to be ashamed of her, and to be ashamed of her would kill her. So you are wrong.”

“Yes?” said Philip.

“Yes,” said Kate, “but do you know what it ought to be? Thewomanought to marry beneath herself, and the manabovehimself; then as much as the woman descends, the man rises, and so——-don't you see?”

She faltered and stopped, and Philip said, “Aren't you talking nonsense,' Kate?”

“Indeed, sir!”

Kate pretended to be angry at the rebuff, and pouted her lips, but her eyes were beaming.

“There is neither above nor below where there is real liking,” said Philip. “If you like any one, and she is necessary to your life, that is the sign of your natural equality. It is God's sign, and all the rest is only man's book-keeping.”

“You mean,” said Kate, trying to keep a grave mouth, “you mean that if a woman belongs to some one she can like, and some one belongs to her, that is being equal, and everything else is nothing? Eh?”

“Why not?” said Philip.

It was music to her, but she wagged her head solemnly and said, “I'm sure you're wrong, Philip. I am, though. Yes, indeed I am. But it's no use arguing. Not against you. Only——”

The glorious choir of love-birds in her bosom were singing so loud that she could say no more, and the irresistible one had his way. After a while, she stuffed something into the fire.

“What's that?” said Philip.

“Oh, nothing,” she answered brightly.

It was the French exercise-book.

Philip went home rebelling against his father's fate. It was accidental; it was inevitable only in the Isle of Man. But perdition to the place where a man could not marry the woman he loved if she chanced to be born in the manger instead of the stable loft. Perdition to the land where a man could not live unless he was a skunk or a cur. Thank God the world was wide.

That night he said to Auntie Nan, “Auntie, why didn't father go away when he found the tide setting so strongly against him?”

“He always meant to, but he never could,” said Auntie Nan. “A woman isn't like a man, ready to pitch her tent here to-day and there to-morrow. We're more like cats, dear, and cling to the places we're used to, if they're only ruins of tumbling stones. Your mother wasn't happy in the Isle of Man, but she wouldn't leave it. Your father wouldn't go without her, and then there was the child. He was here for weal or woe, for life or death. When he married his wife he made the chain that bound him to the island as to a rock.”

“It wouldn't be like that with Kate,” thought Philip. But did Auntie know anything? Had somebody told her? Was she warning him? On Sunday night, on the way home from church, she talked of his father again.

“He came to see at last that it wasn't altogether his own affair either,” she said. “It was the night he died. Your mother had been unwell and father had sent for me. It was a dark night, and late, very late, and they brought me down the hill from Lewaige Cottage with a lantern. Father was sinking, but hewouldget out of bed. We were alone together then, he and I, except for you, and you were asleep in your cot by the window. He made straight for it, and struggled down on his knees at its side by help of the curtains. 'Listen,' he said, trying to whisper, though he could not, for his poor throat was making noises. You were catching your breath, as if sobbing in your sleep. 'Poor little boy, he's dreaming,' said I; 'let me turn him on his side.' 'It's not that,' said father; 'he went to sleep in trouble.'”

“I remember it, Auntie,” said Philip. “Perhaps he had been trying to tell me something.”

“'My boy, my son, forgive me, I have sinned against you,' he said, and he tried to reach over the cot rail and put his lips to your forehead, but his poor head shook like palsy and bobbed down into your little face. I remember you rubbed your nose with your little fist, but you did not waken. Then I helped him back to bed, and the table with the medicine glasses jingled by the trembling of his other hand. 'It's dark, all, all dark, Nannie,' he said, 'sure some angel will bring me light,' and I was so simple I thought he meant the lamp, for it was dying down, and I lit a candle.”

Philip went about his work that week as if the spirit of his father were hovering over him, warning him when awake in words of love and pleading, crying to him in his sleep in tones of anger and command, “Stand back; you are at the edge of the precipice.”

Nevertheless his soul rose in rebellion against this league as of the past and the dead. It was founded in vanity, in the desire for glory and success. Only let a man renounce the world and all that the world can give, and he can be true to himself, to his heart's impulse, to his honour, and to his love. He would deliberate no longer. He despised himself for deliberating. If was the world against Kate, let the world go to perdition.

On Saturday afternoon he was at Peel. It was a beautiful day; the sun was shining, and the bay was blue and flat and quiet. The tide was down, the harbour was empty of water, but full of smacks with hanging sails and hammocks of nets and lines of mollags (bladders) up to the mast heads. A flight of seagulls were fishing in the mud, and swirling through the brown wings of the boats and crying. A flag floated over the ruins of the castle, the church-bells were ringing, and the harbour-masters were abroad in best blue and gold buttons.

On the tilting-ground of the castle the fishermen had gathered, sixteen hundred strong. There were trawlers among them, Manx, Irish, and English, prowling through the crowd, and scooping up the odds and ends of gossip as their boats on the bottom scraped up the little fish. Occasionally they were observed by the herring-fishers, and then there were high words and free fights. “Taking a creep round from Port le Murrey are you, Dan?”—“Thought I'd put a sight on Peel to-day.”—“Bad for your complexion, though; might turn it red, I'm thinking.”—“Strek me with blood will you? I'd just like you to strek me, begough. I'd put a Union Jack on your face as big as a griddle.”

The Governor came, an elderly man, with a formidable air, an aquiline nose, and cheeks pitted with small-pox. Philip introduced the fishermen and told their grievance. Trawling destroyed immature fish, and so contributed to the failure of the fisheries. They asked for power to stop it in the bays of the island, and within three miles of the coast.

“Then draft me a bill with that object, Mr. Christian,” said the Governor, and the meeting ended with cheers for His Excellency, shouts for Philip, and mutterings of contempt from the trawlers. “Didn't think there was a man on the island could spake like it.”—“But hasn't your fancy-man been rubbing his back agen the college?”—“I'd take lil tacks home if I was yourself, Dan.”—“Drink much more and it'll be two feet deep inside of you.”

Philip was hurrying away under the crumbling portcullis, when a deputation of the fishermen approached him. “What are we owing you, Mr. Christian?” asked their spokesman.

“Nothing,” answered Philip.

“We thank you, sir, and you'll be hearing from us again. Meanwhile, a word if you plaze, sir?”

“What is it, men?” said Philip.

“When a young man can spake like yonder, it's a gift, sir, and he's houlding it in trust for something. The ould island's wanting a big man ter'ble bad, and it hasn't seen the like since the days of your own grandfather. Good everin, and thank you—good everin!”

With that the rough fellows dismissed him at the ferry steps, and he hastened to the market-place, where he had left his horse. On putting up, he had seen Cæsar's gig tipped up in the stable-yard. It was now gone, and, without asking questions, he mounted and made towards Ramsey.

He took the old road by the cliffs, and as he cantered and galloped, he hummed, and whistled, and sang, and slashed the trees to keep himself from thinking. At the crest of the hill he sighted the gig in front, and at Port Lady he came up with it. Kate was driving and Cæsar was nodding and dozing.

“You've been having a great day, Mr. Christian,” said Cæsar. “Wish I could say the same for myself; but the heart of man is decaitful, sir, and desperately wicked. I'm not one to clap people in the castle and keep them from sea for debts of drink, and they're taking a mane advantage. Not a penny did I get to-day, sir, and many a yellow sovereign owing to me. If I was like some—now there's that Tom Raby, Glen Meay. He saw Dan the Spy coming from the total meeting last night. 'Taken the pledge, Dan?' says he. 'Yes, I have,' says Dan. 'I'm plazed to hear it,' says he; 'come in and I'll give you a good glass of rum for it.' And Dan took the rum for taking the pledge, and there he was as drunk as Mackilley in the castle this morning.”

Philip listened as he rode, and a half-melancholy, half-mocking expression played on his face. He was thinking of his grandfather, old Iron Christian, brought into relation with his mother's father, Capt. Billy Ballure, of the dainty gentility of Auntie Nan and the unctuous vulgarity of the father of Kate.

Cæsar grumbled himself to sleep at last, and then Philip was alone with the girl, and riding on her side of the gig. She was quiet at first, but a joyous smile lit up her face.

“I was in the castle, too,” she said, with a look of pride.

The sun went down over the waters behind them, and cast their brown shadows on the road in front; the twilight deepened, the night came down, the moon rose in their faces, and the stars appeared. They could hear the tramp of the horses' hoofs, the roll of the gig wheels, the wash and boom of the sea on their left, and the cry Of the sea-fowl somewhere beneath. The lovelinese and warmth of the autumn night stole over Kate, and she began to keep up a flow of merry chatter.

“I can tell all the sounds of the fields in the darkness. By the moonlight? No; but with my eyes shut, if you like. Now try me.”

She closed her eyes and went on: “Do you hear that—that patter like soft rain? That's oats nearly ripe for harvest. Do you hear that, then—that pit-a-pat, like sheep going by on the street? That's wheat, just ready. And there—that whiss, whiss, whiss? That's barley.”

She opened her eyes: “Don't you think I'm very clever?”

Philip felt an impulse to lean over the wheel and put his arms about the girl's neck.

“Take care,” she cried merrily; “your horse is shying.”

He gazed at her face, lit up in the white moonlight. “How bright and happy you seem, Kate!” he said with a shiver; and then he laid one hand on the gig rail.

Her eyelids quivered, her mouth twitched, and she answered gaily, “Why not? Aren't you? You ought to be, you know. How glorious to succeed? It means so much—new things to see, new houses to visit, new pleasures, new friends——”

Her joyous tones broke down in a nervous laugh at that last word, and he replied, in a faltering voice, “That may be true of the big world over yonder, Kate, but it isn't so in a little island like ours. To succeed here is like going up the tower of Castle Rushen with some one locking the doors on the stone steps behind you. At every storey the room becomes less, until at the top you have only space to stand alone. Then, if you should ever come down again, there's but one way for you—over the battlements with a crash.”

She looked up at him with startled eyes, and his own were large and full of trouble. They were going through Kirk Michael by the house of the Deemster, who was ill, and both drew rein and went slowly. Some acacias in the garden slashed their broadswords in the night air, and a windmill behind stood out against the moon like a gigantic bat. The black shadow of the horses stepped beside them.

“Are you feeling lonely to-night, Philip?”

“I'm feeling——”

“Yes?”

“I'm feeling as if the dead and the living, the living and the dead—oh, Kate, Kate, I don't know what I'm feeling.”

She put her hand caressingly on the top of his hand. “Never mind, dear,” she said softly; “I'll stand by you. You shan't bealone.”

It was midday, then, on the tropic seas, and the horizon was closing in with clouds as of blood and vapours of stifling heat. A steamship was rolling in a heavy swell, under winds that were as hot as gusts from an open furnace. Under its decks a man lay in an atmosphere of fever and the sickening odour of bandages and stale air. Above the throb of the engines and the rattle of the rudder chain he heard a step going by his open door, and he called in a feeble voice that was cheerful and almost merry, but yet the voice of a homesick boy—

“How many days from home, engineer?”

“Not more than twenty now.”

“Put on steam, mate; put it on. Wish I could be skipping below and stoking up for you like mad.”

As the ship rolled, the green reflection of the water and the red light of the sky shot alternately through the porthole and lit up the berth like firelight flashing in a dead house.

“Ask the boys if they'll carry me on deck, sir—just for a breath of fresh air.”

The sailors came and carried him. “You can do anything for a chap like that.”

The big sun was straight overhead, weighing down on their shoulders, and there was no shelter anywhere, for the shadows were under foot.

“Slip out the sails, lads, and let's fly along. Wish I could tumble up the rigging myself and look out from the yards same as a gull, but I'm only an ould parrot chained down to my stick.”

They left him, and he gazed out on the circle of water and the vapour shaking over it like a veil. The palpitating air was making the circle smaller every minute, but the world seem cruelly large for all that. He was looking beyond the visible things; he was listening deeper than the wash of the waves; he was dreaming, dreaming. Apparitions were floating in the heat-clouds over him. Home! Its voices whispered at his ear, its face peered into his eyes. But the hot winds came up and danced round him; the air, the sea, the sky, the whole world, the utter universe seemed afire; his eyes rolled upwards to his brow; he almost choked and fainted.

“Carry him below, poor fellow! He's got a good heart to think he'll ever see home again. He'll never see it.”

Half-way down the companion-ladder he opened his eyes with a look of despair. Would God let him die after all?

Kate began to feel that Philip was slipping away from her. He loved her, she was sure of that, but something was dragging them apart Her great enemy was Philip's success. This was rapid and constant. She wanted to rejoice in it; she struggled to feel glad and happy, and even proud. But that was impossible. It was ungenerous, it was mean, but she could not help it—she resented every fresh mark of Philip's advancement.

The world that was carrying Philip up was carrying him away. She would be left far below. It would be presumptuous to lift her eyes to him. Visions came to her of Philip in other scenes than her scenes, among ladies in drawing-rooms, beautiful, educated, clever, able to talk of many things beyond her knowledge. Then she looked at herself, and felt vexed with her hands, made coarse by the work of the farm; at her father, and felt ashamed of the moleskin clothes he wore in the mill; at her home, and flushed deep at the thought of the bar-room.

It was small and pitiful, she knew that, and she shuddered under the sense of being a meaner-hearted girl than she had ever thought. If she could do something of herself to counteract the difference made by Philip's success, if she could raise herself a little, she would be content to keep behind, to let him go first, to see him forge ahead of her, and of everybody, being only in sight and within reach. But she could do nothing except writhe and rebel against the network of female custom, or tear herself in the thorny thicket of female morals.

Harvest had begun; half the crop of Glenmooar had been saved, a third was in stook, and then a wet day had come and stopped all work in the fields. On this wet day, in the preaching-room of the mill, amid forms and desks, with the cranch of the stones from below, the wash of the wheel from outside, and the rush of the uncrushed corn from above, Cæsar sat rolling sugganes for the stackyard, with Kate working the twister, and going backward before him, and half his neighbours sheltering from the rain and looking on.

“Thought I'd have a sight up and tell you,” said Kelly, the postman.

“What's the news, Mr. Kelly?” said Cæsar.

“The ould Dempster's dying,” said Kelly.

“You don't say?” said everybody.

“Well, as good as dying at ten minutes wanting eight o'clock this morning,” said the postman.

“The drink's been too heavy for the man,” said John, the clerk.

“Wine is a serpent, and strong drink a mocker,” said Cæsar.

“Who'll be the new Dempster, Mr. Niplightly,” said Jonaique.

“Hm!” snuffled the constable, easing his helmet, “dat's a serious matter, Mr. Jelly. We'll dake our time—well dake our time.”

“Chut! There's only one man for it,” said Cæsar.

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no,” said the constable.

“Do you mane the young Ballawhaine, Mr. Cregeen?” said the postman.

“Do I mane fiddlesticks!” said Cæsar.

“Well, the man's father is at the Govenar reg'lar, they're telling me,” said Kelly, “and Ross is this, and Ross is that—”

“Every dog praises his own tail,” said Cæsar.

“I'm not denying it, the man isn't fit—he has sold himself to the devil, that's a fact——”

“No, he hasn't,” said Cæsar, “the devil gets the like for nothing.”

“But he's a Christian for all, and the Christians have been Dempsters time out of time——”

“Is he the only Christian that's in, then, eh?” said Cæsar. “Go on, Kate; twist away.”

“Is it Mr. Philip? Aw, I'm saying nothing against Mr. Philip,” said the postman.

“You wouldn't get lave in this house, anyway,” said Cæsar.

“Aw, a right gentleman and no pride at all,” said the postman. “As free and free with a poor man, and no making aisy either. I've nothing agen him myself. No, but a bit young for a Dempster, isn't he? Just a taste young, as the man said, eh?”

“Older than the young Ballawhaine, anyway,” said John, the clerk.

“Aw, make him Dempster, then. I'm raising no objection,” said Mr. Kelly.

“Go on, girl. Does that twister want oiling? Feed it, woman, feed it,” said Cæsar.

“His father should have been Dempster before him,” said John, the clerk. “Would have been too, only he went crooked when he married on yonder woman. She's through though, and what more natural——”

The rope stopped again, and Kate's voice, hard and thick, came from the farther end of it. “His mother being dead, eh?”

“It was the mother that done for the father, anyway,” said the clerk.

“Consequently,” said Kate, “he is to praise God that his mother is gone!”

“That girl wants a doctor,” muttered Jonaique.

“The man couldn't drag the woman up after him,” began the clerk. “It's always the way——”

“Just that,” said Kate, with bitter irony.

“Of coorse, I'm not for saying it was the woman's fault entirely——”

“Don't apologise for her,” said Kate. “She's gone and forgotten, and that being so, her son has now a chance of being Deemster.”

“So he has,” shouted Cæsar, “and not second Dempster only, but first Dempster itself in time, and go on with the twister.”

Kate laughed loudly, and cried, “Why don't you keep it up when your hand's in? First Deemster Christian, and then Sir Philip Christian, and then Lord Christian, and then——But you're talking nonsense, and you're a pack of tattlers. There's no thought of making Philip Christian a Deemster, and no hope of it and no chance of it, and I trust there never will be.”

So saying, she flung the twister on the floor and rushed out of the mill, sobbing hysterically.

“Dr. Clucas is wonderful for females and young girls,” said Jonaique.

“It's that Ross again,” muttered Cæsar.

“And he'll have her yet,” said Kelly, the postman.

“I'd see her dead first,” said Cæsar. “It would be the jaws of hell and the mouth of Satan.”

That she who loved Philip to distraction should be the first to abuse and defame him was agony near to madness, for Kate knew where she stood. It was not merely that Philip's success was separating them, not merely that the conventions of life, its usages, its manners, and its customs were putting worlds between them. The pathos of the girl's position was no accidental thing. It was a deeper, older matter; it was the same to-day as it had been yesterday and would be to-morrow; it began in the garden of Eden and would go on till the last woman died—-it was the natural inferiority of woman in relation to man.

She had the same passions as Philip, and was moved by the same love. But she was not free. Philip alone was free. She had to wait on Philip's will, on Philip's word. She saw Philip slipping away from her, but she could not snatch at him before he was gone; she could not speak first; she could not say, “I love you; stay with me!” She was a woman, only a woman! How wretched to be a woman! How cruel!

But ah! the dear delicious thought! It came stealing up into her heart when the red riot was nearly killing her. What a glorious thing it was to be a woman after all! What a powerful thing! What a lovely and beloved thing! To rule the king, being the slave, was sweeter than to be the king himself. That was woman's place. It was where heaven itself had put her from the beginning until now. What weapons had it given her! Beauty! Charm! Love! The joy of it! To be the weak and overcome the strong! To be nothing in the battle of life, and yet conqueror of all the world!

Kate vowed that, come what would, Philip should never leave her.

On the day when the last of the harvest is saved in the Isle of Man, the farmer gives a supper to his farm-people, and to the neighbours who have helped him to cut and house it. This supper, attended by simple and beautiful ceremonies, is called the Melliah. The parson may be asked to it, and if there is a friend of position and free manners, he also is invited. Cæsar's Melliah fell within a week of the rope-making in the mill, and partly to punish Kate, partly to honour himself, he asked Philip to be present.

“He'll come,” thought Kate with secret joy, “I'm sure he'll come;” and in this certainty, when the day of Melliah came, she went up to her room to dress for it. She was to win Philip that day or lose him for ever. It was to be her trial day—she knew that. She was to fight as for her life, and gain or lose everything. It was to be a battle royal between all the conventions of life, all the network of female custom, all the inferiority of a woman's position as God himself had suffered it to be, and one poor girl.

She began to cry, but struggling with her sadness, she dashed the tears from her glistening eyes. What was there to cry about? Philipwantedto love her, and he should, he must.

It was a glorious day, and not yet more than two o'clock. Nancy had washed up the dinner things, the fire-irons were polished, the boots and spare whips were put up on, the lath, the old hats like lines of heads on a city gate were hung round the kitchen walls, the hearthrug was down, the turf was piled up on the fire, the kettle was singing from the slowrie, and the whole house was taking its afternoon nap.

Kate's bedroom looked over the orchard and across the stackyard up the glen. She could see the barley stack growing in the haggard; the laden cart coming down the glen road with the driver three decks up over the mare, now half smothered and looking suddenly little, like a snail under the gigantic load; and beyond the long meadow and the Bishop's bridge, the busy fields dotted with the yellow stooks and their black shadows like a castle's studded doors.

When she had thrown off her blue-black dress to wash her arms and shoulders and neck were bare. She caught sight of herself in the glass, and laughed with delight. The years had brought her a fuller flow of life. She was beautiful, and she knew it. And Philip knew it too, but he should know it to day as he had never known it before. She folded her arms in their roundness over her bosom in its fulness and walked up and down the little room over the sheep-skin rugs, under the turfy scraas, glowing in the joy of blooming health and conscious loveliness. Then she began to dress.

She took from a drawer two pairs of stockings, one black and the other red, and weighed their merits with moral gravity—which? The red had it, and then came the turn of the boots. There was a grand new pair, with countless buttons, two toecaps like two flowers, and an upward curve like the arm of a glove. She tried them on, bent back and forward, but relinquished them with a sigh in favour of plain shoes cut under the ankles and tied with tape.

Her hair was a graver matter. Its tangled curls had never satisfied her. She tried all means to bring them into subjection; but the roll on top was ridiculous, and the roll behind was formal. She attempted long waves over the temples. It was impossible. With a lash-comb she dragged her hair back to its natural lawlessness, and when it fell on her forehead and over her ears and around her white neck in little knowing rings that came and went, and peeped out and slid back, like kittens at hide-and-seek, she laughed and was content.

From a recess covered by a shawl running on a string she took down her bodice. It was a pink blouse, loose over the breast, like hills of red sand on the shore, and loose, too, over the arms, but tight at the wrist. When she put it on it lit up her head like a gleam from the sunset, and her eyes danced with delight.

The skirt was a print, with a faint pink flower, the sash was a band of cotton of the colour of the bodice, and then came the solemn problems of the throat. It was round, and full, and soft, and like a tower. She would have loved to leave it bare, but dared not. Out of a drawer under the looking-glass she took a string of pearls. They were a present from Kimberley, and they hung over her fingers a moment and then slipped back. A white silk handkerchief, with a watermark, was chosen instead. She tied it in a sailor's knot, with the ends flying loose, and the triangular corner lying down her back.

Last of all, she took out of a box a broad white straw hat, like an oyster shell, with a silver-grey ribbon, and a sweeping ostrich feather.. She looked at it a moment, blew on it, plucked at its ribbon, lifted it over her head, held it at poise there, dropped it gently on to her hair, stood back from the glass to see it, and finally tore it off and sent it skimming on to the bed.

The substitute was her everyday sun-bonnet, which had been lying on the floor by the press. It was also of pale pink, with spots on its print like little shells on a big scallop. When she had tossed it over her black curls, leaving the strings to fall on her bosom, she could not help but laugh aloud.

After all, she was dressed exactly the same as on other days of life, except Sunday, only smarter, perhaps, and fresher maybe.

The sun-bonnet was right though, and she began to play with it. It was so full of play; it lent itself to so many moods. It could speak; it could say anything. She poked it to a point, as girls do when the sun is hot, by closing its mouth over the tip of her nose, leaving only a slumberous dark cave visible, through which her black eyes gleamed and her eyelashes shone. She tied the strings under her chin, and tipped the bonnet back on to her neck, as girls will when the breeze is cool, leaving her hair uncovered, her mouth twitching merrily, and her head like a nymph-head in an aureole. She took it off and tossed it on her arm, the strings still knotted, swinging it like a basket, then wafting it like a fan, and walking as she did so to and fro in the room, the floor creaking, her print frock crinkling, and she herself laughing with the thrill of passion vibrating and of imagined things to come.

Then she went downstairs with a firm and buoyant step, her fresh lithe figure aglow with young blood and bounding health.

At the gate of the “haggard” she met Nancy Joe coming out of the washhouse.

“Lord save us alive!” exclaimed Nancy. “If I ever wanted to be a man until this day!”

Kate kissed and hugged her, then fled away to the Melliah field.

Philip, in Douglas, had received the following communication from Government House:—

“His Excellency will be obliged to Mr. Philip Christian if he will not leave the island for the present without acquainting him of his destination.”

The message was a simple one: it said little, and involved and foreshadowed nothing, but it threw Philip into a condition of great excitement. To relieve his restlessness by giving way to it, he went out to walk. It was the end of the tourist season, and theBen-my-Chreewas leaving the harbour. Newsboys, burrowing among the crowds on the pier to sell a Manx evening paper, were crying, “Illness of the Deemster—serious reports.”

Philip's hair seemed to rise from his head. The two things came together in his mind. With an effort to smudge out the connection he turned back to his lodgings, looking at everything that his eyes fell on in the rattling streets, speaking to everybody he knew, but seeing nothing and hearing nobody. The beast of life had laid its claws on him.

Back in his rooms, he took out of his pocket a packet which Auntie Nan had put in his hand when he was leaving Ramsey. It was a bundle of his father's old letters to his sister cousin, written from London in the days when he was studying law and life was like the opening dawn. “The ink is yellow now,” said Auntie Nan; “it was black then, and the hand that wrote them is cold. But the blood runs red in them yet. Read them, Philip,” she said with a meaning look, and then he was sure she knew of Sulby.

Philip read his father's letters until it was far into the night, and he had gone through every line of them. They were as bright as sunshine, as free as air, easy, playful, forcible, full of picture, but, above all, egotistical, proud with the pride of intellectuality, and vain with the certainty of success. It was this egotism that fascinated Philip. He sniffed it up as a colt sniffs the sharp wind. There was no need to make allowances for it. The castles which his father had been building in the air were only as hovels to the golden palaces which his son's eager spirit was that night picturing. Philip devoured the letters. It was almost as if he had written them himself in some other state of being. The message from Government House lay on a table at his right, and sometimes he put his open hand over it as he sat close under the lamp on a table at his left and read on:—

... “Heard old Broom in the House last night, and today I lunched with him at Tabley's. They call him an orator and the king of conversationalists. He speaks like a pump, and talks like a bottle running water. No conviction, no sincerity, no appeal. Civil enough to me though, and when he heard that father was a Deemster, he told me the title meant Doomster, and then asked me if I knew the meaning of 'House of Keys,' and said it had its origin in the ancient Irish custom of locking the muniment chests with twenty-four keys, whereof each counsellor kept one. When he had left us Tabley asked if he wasn't a wonderful man, and if he didn't know something of everything, and I said, 'Yes, except the things of which I knew a little, and of them he knew nothing.'... My pen runs, runs. But, Nannie, my little Nannie, if this is what London calls a great man, I'll kick the ball like a toy before me yet.”

... “So you are wondering where I am living—in man-sion or attic! Behold me then in Brick Court, Temple, second floor. Goldsmith wrote the 'Vicar' on the third, but I've not got up to that yet. His rooms were those immediately above me. I seem to see him coming down past my door in that wonderful plum-coloured coat. And sitting here at night I think of him—the sudden fear, the solitary death, then these stairs thronged with his pensioners, the mighty Burke pushing through, Reynolds with his ear-trumpet, and big 'blinking Sam,' and last of all the unknown grave, God knows where, by the chapel wall. Poor little Oliver! They say it was a women that was 'in' at the end. No more of the like now, no more debts, no more vain 'talk like poor Poll:' the light's out—all still and dark.”

... “How's my little Nannie? Does she still keep a menagerie for sick dogs and lost cats? And how's the parson-gull with the broken wing, and does he still strut like Parson Kis-sack in his surplice? I was at Westminster Hall yesterday. It was the great trial of Mitchell, M. P., who forged his father's will. Stevens defended—bad, bad, bad, smirking all the while with small facetiæ. But Denman's summing up—oh! oh! such insight, such acuteness! It was wonderful. I had a seat in the gallery. The grand old hall was a thrilling scene—the dense throng, the upturned faces, the counsel, the judges, the officers of court, and then the windows, the statues, the echo of history that made every stone and rafter live—Oh, Nan, Nan, listen to me! If I live I'll sit on the bench there some day—I will, so help me God!”

When Philip had finished his father's letters, he was on the heights, and poor Kate was left far below, out of reach and out of sight. Hitherto his ambitions had been little more than the pale shadow of his father's hopes, but now they were his own realities.

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