She wandered along the shore-sands under the cliffs, the box tightly clasped in her arms, her eyes musingly bent upon the brown reaches of drenched seaweed which lay at play with the receding tide.
Her mind conjured up the image of a smiling and ruddy young face, sun-burned and thatched with crisp, curly brown hair—the face of that curious young O’Mahony from Houghton County. His blue eye looked at her half quizzically, half beseeching, but Kate resolutely drove the image away. He was only the merest trifle less mortal than the others.
So musing, she strolled onward. Suddenly she stopped, and lifted her head triumphantly; the smile had flashed forth again upon her face, and the dark eyes were all aglow. A thought had come to her—so convincing, so unanswerable, so joyously uplifting, that she paused to marvel at having been blind to it so long. Clear as noon sunlight on Mount Gabriel was it what she should pray for.
What could it ever have been, this one crowning object of prayer, but the return of The O’Mahony?
As her mental vision adapted itself to the radiance of this revelation, the abstracted glance which she had allowed to wander over the bay was arrested by a concrete object. Two hundred yards from the water’s edge a strange vessel had heaved to, and was casting anchor. Kate could hear the chain rattling out from the capstan, even as she looked.
The sight sent all prayerful thoughts scurrying out of her head. The presence of vessels of the size of the new-comer was in itself most unusual at Muirisc. But Kate’s practiced eye noticed a strange novelty. The craft, though thick of beam and ungainly in line, carried the staight running bowsprit of a cutter, and in addition to its cutter sheets had a jigger lug-sail. The girl watched these eccentric sails as they were dropped and reefed, with a curious sense of having seen them somewhere before—as if in a vision or some old picture-book of childhood. Confused memories stirred within her as she gazed, and held her mind in daydream captivity. A figure she seemed vaguely to know, stood now at the gunwale.
The spell was rudely broken by a wild shout from the cliff close above her. On the instant, amid a clatter of falling stones and a veritable landslide of sand, rocks and turf, a human figure came rolling, clambering and tumbling down the declivity, and ran toward her, its arms stretched and waving with frantic gestures, and emitting inarticulate cries and groans as it came.
The astonished girl instinctively raised the box in her hands, to use it as a missile. But, lo, it was old Murphy who, half stumbling to his knees at her feet, fiercely clutched her skirts, and pointed in a frenzy of excitement seaward!
“Wid yer own eyes look at it—it, Miss Katie!” he screamed. “Ye can see it yerself! It’s not dr’aming I am!”
“It’s drunk ye are instead, thin, Murphy,” said the girl, sharply, though in great wonderment.