His second letter told me that everything was finished, and he was to visit the island the next week, going first to "the old folks" and coming to me for a few days immediately before setting sail.
That brought matters to a head, and compelled me to take action.
It may have been weak of me, but not wanting a repetition of the scene with Father Dan, (knowing well that Martin would not bear it with the same patience) I sent the second letter to Alma, asking if the arrangement would be agreeable. She returned it with the endorsement (scribbled in pencil across the face), "Certainly; anything to please you, dear."
I submitted even to that. Perhaps I was a poor-spirited thing, wanting in proper pride, but I had a feeling that it was not worth while to waste myself in little squibs of temper, because an eruption was coming (I was sure of that) in which Martin would be concerned on my side, and then everybody and everything would be swept out of the path of my life for ever.
Martin came. In due course I read in the insular newspapers of his arrival on the island—how the people had turned out in crowds to cheer him at the pier, and how, on reaching our own village the neighbours (I knew the names of all of them) had met him at the railway station and taken him to his mother's house, and then lighted fires on the mountains for his welcome home.
It cut me to the heart's core to think of Martin amid thrilling scenes like those while I was here among degrading scenes like these. My love for Martin was now like a wound and I resolved that, come what might, before he reached Castle Raa I should liberate myself from the thraldom of my false position.
Father Dan's counsels had faded away by this time. Though I had prayed for strength to bear my burden there had been no result, and one morning, standing before the figure of the Virgin in my bedroom, I felt an impulse to blow out her lamp and never to light it again.
The end of it all was that I determined to see the Bishop and my father's advocate, Mr. Curphy, and perhaps my father himself, that I might know one way or the other where I was, and what was to become of me. But how to do this I could not see, having a houseful of people who were nominally my guests.
Fortune—ill-fortune—favoured me. News came that my father had suddenly fallen ill of some ailment that puzzled the doctors, and making this my reason and excuse I spoke to my husband, asking if I might go home for two or three days.
"Why not?" he said, in the tone of one who meant, "Who's keeping you?"