Pete's Nickey came into harbour with the morning tide, and the three breakfasted together. As Kate moved heavily in front of the fire, Pete crowed, cooed, and scattered wise winks round the table.
“More milk, mammy,” he whimpered, and then he imitated all kinds of baby prattle.
After breakfast the men smoked, and Kate took up her sewing. She was occupying herself with the little labours, so pretty, so full of delicate humour and delicious joy, which usually open a new avenue for a woman's tenderness. Philip's eyes fell on her, and she dropped below into her lap the tiny piece of white linen she was working on. Pete saw this, stole to the back of her chair, reached over her shoulder, snatched the white thing out of her fingers, held it outstretched in his ponderous hands, and roared like a smithy bellows. It was a baby's shirt.
“Never mind, darling,” he coaxed, as the colour leapt to Kate's face. “Philip must be a sort of a father to the boy some day—a godfather, anyway—so he won't mind seeing his lil shiff. We must be calling him Philip, too. What do you say, Kirry—Philip, is it agreed?”
VII.
As her time drew near, the conviction deepened upon her that she could not be confined in her husband's house. Being there at such a crisis was like living in a volcanic land. One false step, one passionate impulse, and the very earth under her feet would split. “I must go home for awhile, Pete,” she said.
“Coorse you must,” said Pete. “Nobody like the ould angel when a girl's that way.”
Pete took her back to her mother's in the gig, driving very slowly, and lifting her up and down as tenderly as if she had been a child. She breathed freely when she left Elm Cottage, but when she was settled in her own bedroom at “The Manx Fairy” she realised that she had only stepped from misery to misery. So many memories lived like ghosts there—memories of innocent slumbers, and of gleeful awakenings amid the twittering of birds and the rattling of gravel. The old familiar place, the little room with the poor little window looking out on the orchard, the poor little bed with its pink curtains like a tent, the sweet old blankets, the wash-basin, the press, the blind with the same old pattern, the sheepskin rug underfoot, the whitewashed scraas overhead—everything the same, but, O God! how different!
“Let me look at myself in the glass, Nancy,” she said, and Nancy gave her the handglass which had been cracked the morning after the Melliah.