As her mental vision adapted itself to the radiance of this revelation, the abstracted glance which she had allowed to wander over the bay was arrested by a concrete object. Two hundred yards from the water’s edge a strange vessel had heaved to, and was casting anchor. Kate could hear the chain rattling out from the capstan, even as she looked. The sight sent all prayerful thoughts scurrying out of her head. The presence of vessels of the size of the new-comer was in itself most unusual at Muirisc. But Kate’s practiced eye noticed a strange novelty. The craft, though thick of beam and ungainly in line, carried the staight running bowsprit of a cutter, and in addition to its cutter sheets had a jigger lug-sail. The girl watched these eccentric sails as they were dropped and reefed, with a curious sense of having seen them somewhere before--as if in a vision or some old picture-book of childhood. Confused memories stirred within her as she gazed, and held her mind in daydream captivity. A figure she seemed vaguely to know, stood now at the gunwale. The spell was rudely broken by a wild shout from the cliff close above her. On the instant, amid a clatter of falling stones and a veritable landslide of sand, rocks and turf, a human figure came rolling, clambering and tumbling down the declivity, and ran toward her, its arms stretched and waving with frantic gestures, and emitting inarticulate cries and groans as it came. The astonished girl instinctively raised the box in her hands, to use it as a missile. But, lo, it was old Murphy who, half stumbling to his knees at her feet, fiercely clutched her skirts, and pointed in a frenzy of excitement seaward! “Wid yer own eyes look at it--it, Miss Katie!” he screamed. “Ye can see it yerself! It’s not dr’aming I am!” “It’s drunk ye are instead, thin, Murphy,” said the girl, sharply, though in great wonderment. “Wid joy! Wid joy I’m drunk!” the old man shouted, dancing on the sands and slippery sea-litter like one possessed, and whirling his arms about his head. “Murphy, man! What ails ye? In the name of the Lord--what--” The browned, wild-eyed, ragged old madman had started at a headlong pace across the wet waste of weeds, and plunged now through the breakers, wading with long strides--knee-deep, then immersed to the waist. He turned for an instant to shout back: “I’ll swim to him if I drown for it! ’Tis the master come back!” The girl fell to her knees on the sand, then reverently bowed her head till it rested upon the box before her. CHAPTER XXV--BERNARD’S GOOD CHEER. Sorra a wink o’ sleep could I get the night,” groaned the wife of O’Daly--Mrs. Fergus--“what with me man muthered, an’ me daughter drowned, an’ me nerves that disthracted ’t was past the power of hot dhrink to abate em.”