“Well, what if it is, bairn? we can have no Yule fun, you know,” and Doya cast a glance at her husband, who was sitting by the uncurtained window. It was a look which said much: it was a look of reproach, of enquiry, of fear, of love; and the children, who sat beside Doya, crept nearer to her chair and kept silence when they saw that look. But Bartle did not notice either the woman or children. He was a sullen, discontented man, who evaded, as lazy ne’er-do-wells will always do, the poor man’s honest lot—a life of labour. He was the scion of a good old house, which had fallen into poverty and decay. Being too idle and too proud to work for a living, Bartle had left Shetland in his early manhood and had betaken himself to the wild unfettered life of an Australian digger. Years went past, and he came back in his prime and married an orphan cousin, to whom he had been engaged since his youth. He came back a reserved and selfish man, with a shadow on his brow and a strange mystery about even his everyday life. Bartle took up his abode in the half-ruined home of his boyhood, and became a subject of curiosity and conjecture to the whole island. His wife was a lady born, yet it was known that she did all the work of the house, keeping no servant; and the public also discovered that she “knitted and ’broidered and sewed” for a livelihood, just as any poor man’s spouse might do. They did not mingle with their neighbours, but rather shunned the society of high and low. Bartle had no live stock or banked money; he did no work, either mental or physical, and although he always wore the dress of a sailor, he never soiled his fingers with a fishing-line or other marine implements. He always had plenty of silver, nay, even gold, in hand for his own personal wants, yet Doya’s deft fingers provided for herself and the three children. Once Bartle had offered half-a-crown to his wife, when he chanced to overhear the little ones cry for breakfast, but she gave it back with such a gesture of horror and disgust as deterred him from ever repeating the act. And so they jogged on for many years, living in the same house utterly independent of one another, each going their own way—the mother keeping Rassmie, Hermann, and Tronda by her, and the father shrouded in the same mystery which had hitherto encompassed him. On this same dark Yule even, Bartle looked out of window, moodily unconcerned for those within. He looked on a dismal scene. Between the cottage and the sea there stretched a piece of rough stony ground, which hardly allowed a weed to find refuge on it. This meagre morsel of mother earth terminated in a reef of dangerous crags, which were quite covered at high water, but, when the tide was out, extended high and dry between the island and a large grass-crowned skerry, which lay a short distance from the mainland. You could not picture to yourself a more barbarous coast.