Rilla had found a leather handle on one end of the box, and holding fast to this, slowly and with great effort she began dragging it up the rocks and about half an hour later, as a reward for her perseverence, she disappeared with it into a small opening in the cliff, and not a moment too soon, for a stentorian voice, high above her, called, “Rilly gal, where be yo’? Don’ yo’ know as it’s past time for mess?”
“Yeah, Grand-dad. We was just a-comin’,” Which was the truth, for having safely hidden the box in her Treasure Cave, the girl had suddenly thought that she must go at once and prepare her grandfather’s evening meal.
“Shagsie,” she confided, “ol’ dog, we’ll have to wait over till tomorrer to know what’s in it. We’ll come an’ look as soon as its sun-up. Yo-o! How I hope it’s suthin’ wonderful!”
When Muriel Storm entered the kitchen of the small house adjoining the light, her grandfather gazed at her keenly from under his shaggy grey brows. “A severe, unforgiving man,” some folks called him, but he hadn’t looked long at the darling of his heart before his expression changed, softened until those grey eyes that had often struck terror to an offending deckhand shone with a light that was infinitely tender.
“Well, Rilly gal, fust mate of the Lighthouse Craft, I cal’late ye’ve been workin’ purty hard this past hour doin’ nothin’. ’Pears like yer purty het up lookin’.”
The girl made no reply, though she laughed over her shoulder at the old man, who, with his cap pushed back, sat by the stove in his wooden armchair, smoking his corncob pipe in solid comfort.
This was the hour that he liked best, when his gal was cooking his evening meal and chattering to him of this and that—inconsequential things—telling him how the lame pelican that had been away for a week had returned, but not alone, for a beautiful pelican that wasn’t lame at all had been with him, or, when she wasn’t chattering, she was singing meeting-house songs in her sweet untrained voice while she fried the fish and potatoes, but tonight the old captain noted that the girl was unusually silent, that her cheeks were almost feverishly red, and there was a sudden clutching dread in his heart. Just so had the other Rilly, this girl’s mother, looked and acted the day before she ran away and married the young man from the city. The eyes under the shaggy grey brows were hard again, and Rilla, noting in the face of the grand-dad she so loved the expression she dreaded, ran to him, fork in hand and pressing her cheek against his forehead, she cried:
“Oh, Grand-dad, what set yo’ thinkin’ o’ that? Yo’ know I wouldn’t be leavin’ yo’. I love yo’, Grand-dad; I’ll allays, allays stay, an’ be yer fust mate.”
“Clear to the end of the v’yage? Take an oath to it, Rilly?”
It might have seemed ludicrous to an onlooker, but there was no one to see as the girl, with an earnest, almost inspired expression on her truly beautiful face, stood up and lifting her hand, seemingly unconscious that it held a fork, said in a voice ringing with sincerity, “I call God to witness that I’ll never go away from yo’, Grand-dad, without yer permittin’ it.”