"Hush, hush, Ailee darling—hush."
The whimper would be hushed, and again there would be a snatch of the ballad:
In Jorby curragh they dwell alone
By dark peat bogs, where the willows moan,
Down in a gloomy and lonely glen—
Once again the whimper would stop the song.
"Hush, darling; papa is coming to Ailee, yes; and Ailee will see papa, yes, and papa will see Ailee, yes, and Ailee—"
Then a long, low gurgle, a lovely head leaning over the back of the settle and dropping to the middle of the pillow like a lark to its nest in the grass, a long liquid kiss on the soft round baby legs, and then a perfect fit of baby laughter.
It was as pretty a picture as the world had in it on that bleak Christmas Eve. Whatever tumult might reign without, there within was a nest of peace.
Mona was expecting Ewan at Ballamona that night, and now she was waiting for his coming. It was true that when he was there three hours ago it was in something like anger that they had parted, but Mona recked nothing of that. She knew Ewan's impetuous temper no better than his conciliatory spirit. He would come to-night, as he had promised yesterday, and if there had been anger between them it would then be gone.
Twenty times she glanced at the little clock with the lion face and the pendulum like a dog's head that swung above the ingle. Many a time, with head aslant, with parted lips, and eyes alight, she cried "Hark!" to the little one when a footstep would sound in the hall But Ewan did not come, and meantime the child grew more and more fretful as her bedtime approached. At length Mona undressed her and carried her off to her crib in the room adjoining, and sang softly to her while she struggled hard with sleep under the oak hood with the ugly beasts carved on it, until sleep had conquered and all was silence and peace. Then, leaving a tallow dip burning on the table between the crib and the bed, lest perchance the little one should awake and cry from fear of the darkness, Mona went back to her sitting-room to finish off the last bunch of the hibbin and hollin.
The last bunch was a bit of prickly green, with a cluster of the reddest berries, and Mona hung it over a portrait of her brother, which was painted by a great artist from England when Ewan was a child. The Deemster had turned the portrait out of the dining-room after the painful interview at Bishop's Court about the loan and surety, and Mona had found it, face to the wall, in a lumber-room. She looked at it now with a new interest. When she hung the hollin over it she recognized for the first time a resemblance to the little Aileen whom she had just put to bed. How strange it seemed that Ewan had once been a child like Aileen!