JULY 8. Martin writes that he expects to be here on the 12th. Letter full of joyous spirits. "Lots to tell you when I reach home, dearest."

Strange! No mortal can imagine how anxious I am to get him back, yet I almost dread his coming. When he was away before, Time could not go fast enough for me. Now it is going too fast. I know what that means--the story I have to tell. How am I to tell it?

JULY 10. Only two days more and Martin will be here. Of course I must be up when he arrives. Nurse says No, but I say Yes. To be in bed when he comes would be too much a shock for him.

"Servants are such domineering tyrants," says Christian Ann, who never had but one, and "the strange woman" was such a phantom in the house that the poor mistress was grateful to God when Hollantide came round and the ghost walked away of itself. My nurse is a dear, though. How glad I am now that I persuaded Christian Ann to let her stay.

JULY 12. Martin comes to-day, and the old doctor (with such a proud and stately step) has gone off to Blackwater to meet him. I am terribly weak (no pain whatever), but perfectly resolute on dressing and going downstairs towards tea-time. I shall wear a white tea-gown, which Sister Mildred gave me in London. Martin likes me best in white.

LATER. My Martin has come! We had counted it up that travelling across the island by motor-car he would arrive at five, so I was dressed and downstairs by four, sitting in the _chiollagh_ and watching the road through the window opposite. But he was half an hour late, and Christian Ann and I were in such a fever that anybody would have believed it to be half a century and that the world had stood still.

We might have known what would happen. At Blackwater "the boys" (the same that "got up the spree" when Martin went away) had insisted on a demonstration. Then, on reaching our village, Martin had got down and shaken hands with everybody--the joiner and the grocer and the blacksmith and the widow who keeps the corner shop--so that it had taken him a quarter of an hour to get through, amid a general chorus of "The boy he is, though!" and "No pride at all at all!"

After that he drove home at top speed, and my quick ears caught the musical hum of the motor as it crossed the bridge. Good gracious, what excitement!

"Quick nurse, help me to the gate."

I got there just in time to hear a shout, and to see a precipitate bound out of the car and then ... what an embrace!

It is such a good thing my Martin is a big, brawny person, for I don't know how I should have got back to the house, being so weak and breathless just then, if his strong arm had not been round my waist.

Dr. O'Sullivan had come too, looking as gay as a humming-bird, and after I had finished with Martin I kissed him also (having such a largesse of affection to distribute generally), whereupon he blushed like a boy, bless him, and stammered out something about St. Patrick and St. Thomas, and how he wouldn't have believed anybody who had said there was anything so sweet, etc.

Martin said I was looking so well, and he, too, declared he wouldn't have believed any man who had sworn I could have looked so much better in the time.

My nervous thermometer must have gone up by leaps and bounds during the next hour, for immediately after tea the old doctor ordered me back to bed, though I refused to go until he had faithfully promised that the door to the staircase should be kept open, so that I could hear what was said downstairs.

What lots of fun they had there! Half the parish must have come in "to put a sight" on Martin after his investiture, including old Tommy the Mate, who told everybody over and over again that he had "known the lad since he was a lump" and "him and me are same as brothers."

The old doctor's stately pride must have been something to see. It was "Sir Martin" here and "Sir Martin" there, until I could have cried to hear him. I felt just as foolish myself, too, for though I cannot remember that my pulse gave one extra beat when they made me "your ladyship," now that Martin has become... . But that's what we women are, you see!

At length Martin's big voice came up clear above the rest, and then the talk was about the visit to Windsor. Christian Ann wanted to know if he wasn't "freckened" to be there, "not being used of Kings," whereupon he cried:

"What! Frightened of another man--and a stunning good one, too!"

And then came a story of how the King had asked if he hadn't been in fear of icebergs, and how he had answered No, you could strike more of them in a day in London (meaning icy-hearted people) than in a life-time in the Antarctic.

I suppose I must have laughed at that, for the next I heard was:

"Hush! Isn't that Mary!"

"Aw, yes, the poor _veg veen_," said a sad voice. It was Christian Ann's. At the bottom of her heart I shall always be the child who "sang carvals to her door."

What a wonderful day! I shall not sleep a wink to-night, though.

To-morrow I must tell him.

JULY 13. I intended to tell Martin this morning, but I really couldn't.

I was going downstairs to breakfast, holding on to the bannisters at one side and using nurse's shoulder as my other crutch, when I saw the brightest picture I have ever beheld. Baby and Martin were on hands and knees on the rag-work hearthrug, face to face--Martin calling her to come, Isabel lifting up her little head to him, like a fledgling in a nest, and both laughing with that gurgling sound as of water bubbling out of a bottle.

This sight broke all the breath out of me at the very first moment. And when Martin, after putting me into my place in the _chiollagh_, plunged immediately into a rapturous account of his preparations for our departure--how we were to be married by special license at the High Bailiff's on the tenth (if that date would do), how I was to rest a day and then travel up to London on the twelfth, and then rest other four days (during which warm clothes could be bought for me), and sail by the _Orient_ on the sixteenth--I could not find it in my heart to tell him then of the inexorable fate that confronted us.

It was cowardice, I knew, and sooner or later I should have to pay for it. But when he went on to talk about baby, and appealed to his mother to say if she wouldn't look after Girlie when I was gone, and Christian Ann (in such a different tone) said Yes, she would look after Girlie when I was gone, I decided that I dared not tell him at all--I would die rather than do so.

The end of it all is that I have arranged with Christian Ann, the old doctor, and Father Dan that Time and Martin's own observation are to tell him what is going to happen, and none of us are to say anything about it.

What a deceiver I am, though! I put it all down to my unselfish love for Martin. It would be such a blow to him--disturbing his plans, upsetting everything, perhaps causing him to postpone his Expedition, or even to abandon it altogether. "Let the truth fall soft on him. He'll see it soon enough. Don't let us be cruel."

The dear sweet, unsuspecting old darlings have taken it all in--all my vain and cowardly selfishness. I am to play the part of pretending to fall in with Martin's plans, and they are to stand by and say nothing.

Can I do it? I wonder, I wonder!

JULY 15. I am becoming quite a great actress! It's astonishing to see how I develop my deceptions under all sorts of veils and disguises.

Martin told me to-day that he had given up the idea of leaving me at Wellington and had determined to take me on to Winter Quarters, having met, on the way to Windsor, some great specialist in my kind of malady (I wonder how much he knows of it), who declared that the climate of the Antarctic would act on me like magic.

Such glorious sunshine in summer! Such crisp, dry, stimulating air! New life with every breath! Such a stunning little house, too, so cosy and comfortable! And then the men whom he would leave behind while he slipped down South--they would worship me!

"How splendid! How glorious!" I cried. "How delightful to be mistress over a houseful of big, hungry, healthy boys, who come in out of the snow and want to eat up everything!"

Sometimes I feel myself being carried away by my own acting, and then I see the others (Christian Ann and the old doctor and Father Dan) dropping their heads or stealing out of the room.

I wish I were not so weak. I feel no pain whatever. Only this temperature during the nights and the ever-deepening exhaustion in the mornings.

JULY 16. I am keeping it up! To-day I was alone with Martin for a long hour in the garden-house. Weather soft and beautiful, the heavens blue, and gleams of sunshine coming through the trellis-work.

Merely to sit beside my darling with his odour of health is to feel a flood of bodily strength coursing through me, enough to make me forget that I am a frail thing myself, who could be blown away by a puff of wind. But to hear him talk on his own subject is to be lifted up to the highest reaches of the soul.

I always say there is a dumb poet in every explorer; but the poet wasn't dumb to-day when Martin talked about the cyclone or anticyclone, or whatever it is which covers the region of the South Pole like a cap, and determines the weather of a great part of the habitable globe.

"We are going to take from God his word and pass it on to the world," he said.

After that he made reference (for the first time since his return) to the difficulties of our position, saying what a glorious thing it would be to escape to that great free region from the world of civilisation, with its effete laws and worn-out creeds which enslave humanity.

"Only a month to-day until we start, and you'll be well enough to travel then, dearest."