But Bessie was in tears again by that time, so mother and daughter lifted the tin box into a tailless market cart that stood waiting in the road, climbed over the wheel to the plank seat across it, and turned their horse's head towards home.
Dan Baldromma's mill stood face to the high road and back to the glen and the mountains—a substantial structure with a thatched and whitewashed dwelling-house attached, a few farm buildings and a patch of garden, which, though warm and bright in summer under its mantle of gillie-flower and fuchsia, looked bleak enough now with its row of decapitated cabbage stalks and the straw roofs of its unprotected beehives.
As mother and daughter came up in their springless cart they heard the plash of the mill-wheel and the groan of the mill-stone, and by that they knew that their lord and master was at work within. So they stabled their horse for themselves, tipped up their cart and went into the kitchen—a bare yet clean and cosy place, with earthen floor, open ingle and a hearth fire, over which a kettle hung by a sooty chain.
But hardly had Bessie taken off her coat and hat and sat down to the cup of tea her mother had made her when the throb of the mill-wheel ceased, and Dan Baldromma's heavy step came over the cobbled "street" outside to the kitchen door.
He was a stoutly-built man, short and gross, with heavy black eyebrows, thick and threatening lips, a lowering expression, and a loud and growling voice. Seeing the girl at her meal he went over to the ingle and stood with his back to the fire, and his big hands behind him, while he fell on her with scorching sarcasm.
"Well! Well!" he said. "Back again, I see! And you such a grand woman grown since you were sitting and eating on that seat before. Only sixteen years for Spring, yet sooreying (sweet-hearting) already, I hear! With no wooden-spoon man neither, like your father—your stepfather, I mane! The son and heir of one of the big ones of the island, they're telling me! And yet you're not thinking mane of coming back to the house of a common man like me! Wonderful! Wonderful!"
Bessie felt as if her bread-and-butter were choking her, but Dan, whose impure mind was not satisfied with the effect of his sarcasm, began to lay out at her with a bludgeon.
"You fool!" he said. "You've been mixing yourself up with bad doings on the road, and now a dacent lad is lying at death's door through you, and the High Bailiff is after flinging you out of his house as unfit for his family—that's it, isn't it?"
Bessie had dropped her head on the table, but Mrs. Collister's frightened face was gathering a look of courage.
"Aisy, man veen, aisy," said the mother. "Take care of thy tongue, Dan."