Since that first day on which her boy and her husband talked together, and every day thereafter when Sunlocks had called out "Little Michael! little Michael!" and she had sent the child in, with his little flaxen curls combed out, his little chubby face rubbed to a shiny red, and all his little body smelling sweet with the soft odors of childhood, she had noticed—she could not help it—that Sunlocks listened for the sound of her own footstep whenever by chance (which might have been rare) she passed his way.
And at first this was a cause of fear to her, lest he should discover her before her time came to reveal herself; and then of hope that he might even do so, and save her against her will from the sickening pains of hungry waiting; and finally of horror, that perhaps after all he was thinking of her as another woman. This last thought sent all the blood of her body tingling into her face, and on the day it flashed upon her, do what she would she could not but hate him for it as for an infidelity that might not be forgiven.
"He never speaks of me," she thought, "never thinks of me; I am dead to him; quite, quite dead and swept out of his mind."
It was a cruel conflict of love and hate, and if it had come to a man he would have said within himself, "By this token I know that she whom I love has forgotten me, and may be happy with another some day. Well, I am nothing—let me go my ways." But that is not the gospel of a woman's love, with all its sweet, delicious selfishness. So after Greeba had told herself once or twice that her husband had forgotten her, she told herself a score of times that do what he would he should yet be hers, hers only, and no other woman's in all the wide world. Then she thought, "How foolish! Who is there to take him from me? Why, no one."
About the same time she heard Sunlocks question the priest concerning her, asking what the mother of little Michael was like to look upon. And the priest answered that if the eyes of an old curmudgeon like himself could see straight, she was comely beyond her grade in life, and young, too, though her brown hair had sometimes a shade of gray, and gentle and silent, and of a soft and touching voice.
"I've heard her voice once," said Sunlocks. "And her husband was an Icelander, and he is dead, you say?"
"Yes," said the priest; "and she's like myself in one thing."
"And what is that?" said Sunlocks.
"That she has never been able to look at anybody else," said the priest. "And that's why she is here, you must know, burying herself alive on old Grimsey."
"Oh," said Sunlocks, in the low murmur of the blind, "if God had but given me this woman, so sweet, so true, so simple, instead of her—of her—and yet—and yet——"