"Isn't she a little fairy, a little angel, a little cherub?" I cried. "And that nasty, nasty birthmark quite, quite gone."
The ugly word had slipped out unawares, but Martin had caught it, and though I tried to make light of it, he gave me no peace until I had told him what it meant—with all the humiliating story of my last night at Castle Raa and the blow my husband had struck me.
"But that's all over now," I said.
"Is it? By the Lord God I swear it isn't, though!" said Martin, and his face was so fierce that it made me afraid.
But just at that moment Christian Ann came downstairs, and the old doctor returned from his rounds, and then Tommy the Mate looked in on his way to the "Plough," and hinting at my going to church again some day, gave it as his opinion that if I put the "boght mulish" under my "perricut" (our old island custom for legitimising children) "the Bishop himself couldn't say nothin' against it"-at which Martin laughed so much that I thought he had forgotten his vow about my husband.
MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD
I hadn't, though.
The brute! The bully! When my darling told me that story (I had to drag it out of her) I felt that if I had been within a hundred miles at the time, and had had to crawl home to the man on my hands and knees, there wouldn't have been enough of him left now to throw on the dust-heap.
Nearly two years had passed since the debt was incurred, but I thought a Christian world could not go on a day longer until I had paid it back—with interest.
So fearing that my tender-hearted little woman, if she got wind of my purpose, might make me promise to put away my vow of vengeance, I got up early next morning and ordered the motor-car to be made ready for a visit to Castle Raa.