“I had my own trouble with them after you left,” said Kinsella.
“I’m sorry to hear that and I wouldn’t have thought it. Barnabas seemed to me a nice peaceable kind of curate. Why didn’t you hit him on the head with an oar? That would have quieted him.”
“I might, of course; and I would; but it was the lady that was giving me the trouble more than him. Nothing would do her right or wrong but she’d have her tent set up on the south end of the island; and that’s what wouldn’t suit me at all.”
Priscilla glanced at the smaller of the two hills which make up the island of Inishbawn. It stood remote from the Kinsellas’ homestead and the patches of cultivated land, separated from them by a rough causeway of grey boulders. From a hollow in it a thin column of smoke arose, and was blown in torn wreaths along the slope.
“It would not suit you a bit,” said Priscilla.
“What made her want to go there?” said Frank.
The bare southern hill of Inishbawn seemed to him a singularly unattractive camping ground. It was a windswept, desolate spot.
“She took a notion into her head,” said Kinsella, “that his Reverence might catch the fever if he stopped on this end of the island.”
“Good gracious!” said Frank, “how can any one catch fever here?”
“On account of Mrs. Kinsella and the children having come out all over large yellow spots,” said Priscilla. “I hope that will be a lesson to you, Joseph Antony.”