After that all was silent as death. Half an hour later, Dan Mylrea was walking through the darkness toward Ballamona. In his blind misery he was going to Mona. The snow was not falling now, and in the lift of the storm the sky was lighter than it had been. As Dan passed the old church, he could just descry the clock. The snow lay thick on the face, and clogged the hands. The clock had stopped. It stood at five exactly. The blind leading that is here of passion by accident is everywhere that great tragedies are done. It is not the evil in man's heart more than the deep perfidy of circumstance that brings him to crime. CHAPTER XXI THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT However bleak the night, however dark the mood of the world might be, there was a room in Ballamona that was bright with one beautiful human flower in bloom. Mona was there--Mona of the quiet eyes and the silent ways and the little elfish head. It was Christmas Eve with her as with other people, and she was dressing the house in hibbin and hollin from a great mountain of both that Hommy-beg had piled up in the hall. She was looking very smart and happy that night in her short body of homespun turned in from neck to waist, showing a white habit-shirt and a white handkercheif crossed upon it; a quilted overskirt and linen apron that did not fall so low as to hide the open-work stockings and the sandal-shoes. Her room, too, was bright and sweet, with its glowing fire of peat and logs on the wide hearth, its lamp on the square oak table, and the oak settle drawn up between them. In one corner of the settle, bubbling and babbling and spluttering and cooing amid a very crater of red baize cushions, was Mona's foster-child, Ewan's motherless daughter, lying on her back and fighting the air with clinched fists. While Mona picked out the hibbin from the hollin, dissected both, made arches and crosses and crowns and rosettes, and then sprinkled flour to resemble snow on the red berries and the green leaves, she sung an old Manx ballad in snatches, or prattled to the little one in that half-articulate tongue that comes with the instinct of motherhood to every good woman that God ever makes. I rede ye beware of the Carrasdoo men As ye come up the wold; I rede ye beware of the haunted glen-- But a fretful whimper would interrupt the singer. "Hush, hush, Ailee darling--hush." The whimper would be hushed, and again there would be a snatch of the ballad: In Jorby curragh they dwell alone By dark peat bogs, where the willows moan, Down in a gloomy and lonely glen-- Once again the whimper would stop the song. "Hush, darling; papa is coming to Ailee, yes; and Ailee will see papa, yes, and papa will see Ailee, yes, and Ailee--" Then a long, low gurgle, a lovely head leaning over the back of the settle and dropping to the middle of the pillow like a lark to its nest in the grass, a long liquid kiss on the soft round baby legs, and then a perfect fit of baby laughter.