“You’re too venturesome, Miss, to be coming out all this way in that
little boat,” he said.
“We came safe enough,” said Priscilla, “didn’t ship a drop the whole way
out.”
“You came safe,” said Kinsella, “but will you tell me how you’re going
to get home again? The wind’s freshening and what’s more it’s drawing
round to the southeast.”
“Let it. If we can’t get home, we can’t, that’s all. I suppose Mrs.
Kinsella will bake us a loaf of bread for breakfast tomorrow. Cousin
Frank, you’ll have to make Barnabas take you into his tent. He can’t
very well refuse on account of being a clergyman and so more or less
pledged to deeds of charity. I’ll curl up in a corner of Lady Isabel’s
pavilion. By the way, Joseph Antony, how are the young people getting
on?”
“I had my own trouble with them after you left,” said Kinsella.
“I’m sorry to hear that and I wouldn’t have thought it. Barnabas seemed
to me a nice peaceable kind of curate. Why didn’t you hit him on the
head with an oar? That would have quieted him.”
“I might, of course; and I would; but it was the lady that was giving me
the trouble more than him. Nothing would do her right or wrong but she’d
have her tent set up on the south end of the island; and that’s what
wouldn’t suit me at all.”
Priscilla glanced at the smaller of the two hills which make up the
island of Inishbawn. It stood remote from the Kinsellas’ homestead and
the patches of cultivated land, separated from them by a rough causeway
of grey boulders. From a hollow in it a thin column of smoke arose, and
was blown in torn wreaths along the slope.
“It would not suit you a bit,” said Priscilla.
“What made her want to go there?” said Frank.
The bare southern hill of Inishbawn seemed to him a singularly
unattractive camping ground. It was a windswept, desolate spot.
“She took a notion into her head,” said Kinsella, “that his Reverence
might catch the fever if he stopped on this end of the island.”
“Good gracious!” said Frank, “how can any one catch fever here?”
“On account of Mrs. Kinsella and the children having come out all over
large yellow spots,” said Priscilla. “I hope that will be a lesson to
you, Joseph Antony.”
“What I said was for the best,” said Kinsella.
“How was I to know she’d be here at the latter end?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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