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But anent this hitch, it teases me a little, I confess, on Kitty’s account, when Cecil meanders over to the island at all hours of the day. To be sure, it relieves Kitty of his company; but is she so glad, after all, to be relieved?

It was last Friday, after one of Harshaw’s entirely frank but perfectly unexplained absences, that he came into camp and inquired if there was any clam-broth left in the kitchen. I referred him to the cook. Finding there was, he returned to me and asked if he might take a tin of it to Miss Malcolm for her patient.

“Who is Miss Malcolm?” I asked. But of course who could she be but the lady of the island, where he spends the greater part of his time? He was welcome to the clam-broth, or anything else he thought would be acceptable in that quarter, I said. And how was the patient?

“Oh, she’s quite bad all the time. She doesn’t get about. I wonder if you’d mind, Mrs. Daly, if I asked you to look in on her some day? The old creature’s in a sad way, it seems to me.”

Of course I didn’t mind, if Miss Malcolm did not. Harshaw seemed to feel authorized to assure me of that fact. So I went first with Tom, and then I went again alone, leaving Harshaw in the boat with Kitty.

Miss Malcolm’s maid or man servant, or both–for she does the work of both, and looks in her bed (dressed in a flannel bed-sack, her head tied up in an old blue knitted “fascinator”) less like a woman than anything I ever beheld–appears to have had a mild form of grippe fever, and having never been sick in her life before, she thought she was nearing her end. My simple treatment, the basis of which was quinine and whiskey, seemed to strike old Tamar favorably; and after the second visit there was no need to come again to see her. But by this time I was deep in the good books of her mistress, who knows too little of illness herself to appreciate how little has been done, by me at least, or how very little needed to be done after restoring the old woman’s confidence in her power to live. (The last time I saw her she still wore the blue fascinator, but with a man’s hat on top of it; she was waddling toward the cow-corral with half a haystack, it looked like, poised on a hay-fork above her head. She was certainly a credit to her doctor, if not to her corsetiere, she and the haystack being much of a figure.)

Miss Malcolm’s innocent gratitude is most embarrassing, really painful, under the circumstances, and the poor child cannot let the circumstances alone. She imagines I am always thinking about Tom’s scheme. It is evident that she is; and not being exactly a woman of the world, out of the fullness of her heart her mouth speaketh. That would be all right if she would speak to somebody else. I don’t want to take advantage of her gratitude, as she seems determined I shall do.

“You must think me a very strained, sentimental creature,” she said to me the last time, “to care so much for a few old rocks and a little piece of foamy water.”

I didn’t think so at all, I told her. If I had lived there all my life, I should feel about the place just as she did.

Here she began to blush and distress herself. “But think how kind you have all been to me! Mr. Harshaw was here every day, after he found how ill poor Tamar was. He did so many things: he lifted her, for one thing, and that I couldn’t have done to save her life. And your two visits have simply cured her! And here I am making myself a stumbling-block and ruining your husband’s plans!”