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.

She pushed it away peevishly.  “What’s the use of a thing like that?” she said.

Pete haunted the house day and night.  There was no bed for him there, and he was supposed to go home to sleep.  But he wandered away in the darkness over the Curragh to the shore, and in the grey of morning he was at the door again, bringing the cold breath of the dawn into the house with the long whisper round the door ajar.  “How’s she going on now?”

The women bundled him out bodily, and then he hung about the roads like a dog disowned.  If he heard a sigh from the dairy loft, he sat down against the gable and groaned.  Grannie tried to comfort him.  “Don’t be taking on so, boy.  It’ll be all joy soon,” said she, “and you’ll be having the child to shew for it.”

But Pete was bitter and rebellious.  “Who’s wanting the child anyway?” said he.  “It’s only herself I’m wanting; and she’s laving me; O Lord, she’s laving me.  God forgive me!” he muttered.  “O good God, forgive me!” he groaned:  “It isn’t fair, though.  Lord knows it isn’t fair,” he mumbled hoarsely.

At last Nancy Joe came out and took him in hand in earnest.

“Look here, Pete,” she said.  “If you’re wanting to kill the woman, and middling quick too, you’ll go on the way you’re going.  But if you don’t, you’ll be taking to the road, and you won’t be coming back till you’re wanted.”

This settled Pete’s restlessness.  The fishing had begun early that season, and he went off for a night to the herrings.

Kate waited long, and the women watched her with trembling.  “It’s a week or two early,” said one.  “The weather’s warm,” said another.  “The boghee millish!  She’s a bit soon,” said Grannie.

There was less of fear in Kate’s own feelings.

“Do women often die?” she asked.

“The proportion is small,” said the doctor.

Half an hour afterwards she spoke again.

“Does the child sometimes die?”

“Well, I’ve known it to happen, but only when the mother has had a shock ­lost her husband, for example.”

She lay tossing on the bed, wishing for her own death, hoping for the death of the unborn child, dreading its coming lest she should hate and loathe it.  At last came the child’s first cry ­that cry out of silence that had never broken on the air before, but was henceforth to be one of the world’s voices for laughter and for weeping, for joy and for sorrow, to her who had borne it into life.  Then she called to them to show her the baby, and when they did so, bringing it up with soft cooings and foolish words, she searched the little wrinkled face with a frightened look, then put up her arms to shut out the sight, and cried “Take it away,” and turned to the wall.  Her vague fear was a certainty now; the child was the child of her sin ­she was a bad woman.

Yet there is no shame, no fear, no horror, but the pleading of a new-born babe can drown its clamour.  The child cried again, and the cruel battle of love and dread was won for motherhood.  The mother heart awoke and swelled.  She had got her baby, at all events.  It was all she had for all she had suffered; but it was enough, and a dear and precious prize.

“Are you sure it is well?” she asked.  “Quite, quite well?  Doesn’t its little face look as if its mammy had been crying ­no?”

“’Deed no,” said Grannie, “but as bonny a baby as ever was born.”

The women were scurrying up and down, giggling on the landings, laughing on the stairs, and saying hush at their own noises as they crept into the room.  In a fretful whimper the child was still crying, and Grannie was telling it, with many wags of the head and in a mighty stern voice, that they were going to have none of its complaining now that it had come at last; and Kate Herself, with hands clasped together, was saying in a soft murmur like a prayer, “God is very good, and the doctor is good too.  God is good to give us doctors.”

“Lie quiet, and I’ll come back in an hour or two,” said Dr. Mylechreest from half-way through the door.

“Dear heart alive, what will the father say?” cried Grannie, and then the whole place broke into that smile of surprise which comes to every house after the twin angels of Life and Death have brooded long over its roof-tree, and are gone at length before the face of a little child.