Yet another year went by, and then over the luminous innocence of the children there crept the strange trail of sex, revealing already their little differences of character, and showing what they were to be in days to come—the little maid, quick, urgent, impulsive, and vain; the little man, quiet, unselfish, and patient, but liable to outbursts of temper.
A fourth year passed, and then the little people were parted. The Duchess came from London, where her nights had no repose and her days no freshness, to get back a little of the colour of the sun into her pallid cheeks, and driving one day from Mount Murray to Government House, she lit on Greeba in the road outside Castletown. It was summer, and the little maiden of eight, bright as the sunlight that glistened on her head, her cheeks all pink and white, her eyes sparkling under her dark lashes, her brown hair rippling behind her, her frock kilted up in fishwife fashion, her legs bare, and her white linen sun-bonnet swinging in her hand, was chasing a butterfly amid the yellow-tipped gorse by the roadside. That vision of beauty and health awakened a memory of less charm and freshness. The Duchess remembered a little maiden of her own who was also eight years old, dainty and pretty, but pale and sickly, peaked up in a chill stone house in London, playing alone with bows and ribbons, talking to herself, and having no companion except a fidgety French governess, who was wrinkled and had lost some of her teeth.
A few days later the Duchess came again to Government House, brought a gay new hat for Greeba, and proposed that the little maid should go home with her as playfellow for her only child. Adam promptly said "No" to her proposal, with what emphasis his courtesy would permit, urging that Greeba, being so much younger than her brothers, was like an only child in the family, and that she was in any case an only daughter. But Adam's wife, thinking she saw her opportunity, found many reasons why Greeba should be allowed to go. For would it be right to cross the wish of so great a lady? and one, too, who was in a sense their mistress also. And then who could say what the Duchess might do for the child some day!—and in any event, wasn't it a chance for which anybody else in the island would give both his ears to have his daughter brought up in London, and at the great house of the Duke of Athol?
The end of it was that Adam yielded to his wife now, as he had often yielded before. "But I'll sadly miss my little lassie,"
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