“You might say wretched, and be nearer the mark.” “Is it celebrated for sport? Is the shooting or the fishing the great attraction?”
“There’s no shooting, nor any fishing but the deep sea fishery; and more men are lost in that than there are fortunes made of it.”
“And what could have induced Mr. Luttrell to take up his abode in such a spot?”
“The same thing that sends men off to America, and Australia, and New Zealand; the same thing that makes a man eat black bread when he can’t get white; the same thing that—-But what’s the use of telling you about the symptoms, when you never so much as heard of the disease?”
“Miss Luttrell’s life must be a very lonely one,” said Sir “Within, with every effort to talk in a tone of unconcern.
“‘Tis the wonder of wonders how she bears it. I asked the woman that lives with them how she passed her time and what she did, and she said, ‘She takes up everything for a week or ten days, and goes at it as if her life depended on it.’ One time it was gathering plants, and sprigs of heath, and moss, and the like—even seaweed she’d bring home—going after them up crags and cliffs that a goat couldn’t climb. Then she’d give up that and take to gardening, and work all day long; then it was making fishing-nets; then it was keeping a school, and teaching the fishermen’s children; she even tried to teach them to sing, till a sudden thought struck her that they ought to have a lifeboat on the island, and she sat to writing to all the people that she could think of to send a plan of one, meaning, I suppose”—here he grinned—“to make it herself afterwards.”
Sir Within listened eagerly to’ all this, and then asked:
“And her uncle—does he aid her in these projects?”