LATER. My Martin has come! We had counted it up that travelling across the island by motor-car he would arrive at five, so I was dressed and downstairs by four, sitting in the chiollagh and watching the road through the window opposite. But he was half an hour late, and Christian Ann and I were in such a fever that anybody would have believed it to be half a century and that the world had stood still.
We might have known what would happen. At Blackwater "the boys" (the same that "got up the spree" when Martin went away) had insisted on a demonstration. Then, on reaching our village, Martin had got down and shaken hands with everybody—the joiner and the grocer and the blacksmith and the widow who keeps the corner shop—so that it had taken him a quarter of an hour to get through, amid a general chorus of "The boy he is, though!" and "No pride at all at all!"
After that he drove home at top speed, and my quick ears caught the musical hum of the motor as it crossed the bridge. Good gracious, what excitement!
"Quick nurse, help me to the gate."
I got there just in time to hear a shout, and to see a precipitate bound out of the car and then . . . what an embrace!
It is such a good thing my Martin is a big, brawny person, for I don't know how I should have got back to the house, being so weak and breathless just then, if his strong arm had not been round my waist.
Dr. O'Sullivan had come too, looking as gay as a humming-bird, and after I had finished with Martin I kissed him also (having such a largesse of affection to distribute generally), whereupon he blushed like a boy, bless him, and stammered out something about St. Patrick and St. Thomas, and how he wouldn't have believed anybody who had said there was anything so sweet, etc.
Martin said I was looking so well, and he, too, declared he wouldn't have believed any man who had sworn I could have looked so much better in the time.
My nervous thermometer must have gone up by leaps and bounds during the next hour, for immediately after tea the old doctor ordered me back to bed, though I refused to go until he had faithfully promised that the door to the staircase should be kept open, so that I could hear what was said downstairs.
What lots of fun they had there! Half the parish must have come in "to put a sight" on Martin after his investiture, including old Tommy the Mate, who told everybody over and over again that he had "known the lad since he was a lump" and "him and me are same as brothers."