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"Let me look at myself in the glass, Nancy," she said, and Nancy gave her the handglass which had been cracked the morning after the Melliah. She pushed it away peevishly. "What's the use of a thing like that?" she said. Pete haunted the house day and night. There was no bed for him there, and he was supposed to go home to sleep.
Draw the harrow over their souls, plough the fallows of their hearts, grind the chaff out of their household, let not the sweet apple and the crabs grow on the same bough together, give them a Melliah, let not a sheaf be forgotten, grant them the soul of this girl for a harvest-home, and of this boy for a last stook. Cæsar was dissatisfied with the results.
To be nothing in the battle of life, and yet conqueror of all the world! Kate vowed that, come what would, Philip should never leave her. On the day when the last of the harvest is saved in the Isle of Man, the farmer gives a supper to his farm-people, and to the neighbours who have helped him to cut and house it. This supper, attended by simple and beautiful ceremonies, is called the Melliah.
"I'm busy as Trap's wife," she said, "and if you were the Govenar itself you wouldn't get lave to spake to me now. Put a sight on himself on the field yonder, the second meadow past the Bishop's bridge, and come back with the boys to supper." Philip found the Melliah field. Two-score workers, men, women, and children, a cart and a pair of horses were scattered over it.
Philip decided to go to the Melliah. It would give him the chance he wanted of breaking off the friendship finally. More than friendship there had never been, except secretly, and that could not count. He knew he was deceiving himself; he felt an uneasy sense of loss of honour and a sharp pang of tender love as often as Kate's face rose up before him.
It was a flower, a broken stem, a torn rose, and a few scattered rose leaves. Only a relic of the last occupants, but it brought back the perfume of love, a sense of tenderness, of bright eyes, of a caress, a kiss. His mind went back to Sulby, to the Melliah, to the glen, to the days so full of tremulous love, when they hovered on the edge of the precipice. They had been hurled over it since then.
Not being able to marry him, she would marry no man. She would do as he was doing she would suffer and stand alone. By this time Philip's love, which, in spite of himself, had grown cool since the Melliah, and in his fierce battle with his worldly aims, suddenly awakened to fresh violence at the approach of another man.
"He'll come," thought Kate with secret joy, "I'm sure he'll come;" and in this certainty, when the day of Melliah came, she went up to her room to dress for it. She was to win Philip that day or lose him for ever. It was to be her trial day she knew that. She was to fight as for her life, and gain or lose everything.
The company assembled at Sulby Bridge, and marched through the village to a revival chorus. They stopped at a field of Cæsar's in the glen it was last year's Melliah field and Cæsar mounted a cart which had been left there to serve as a pulpit. Then they sang again, and, breaking up into many companies, went off into little circles that were like gorse rings on the mountains.
Cæsar came into the house on the top of this commotion, grumbling as he stepped over the porch, "The wind has taken half the stacks of my haggard, mother." "No matter, sir," shouted Pete. "The best of your Melliah is saved upstairs." "Is she herself?" said Cæsar. "Praise His name!"
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