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Kate had not returned when Pete got back to Sulby, but the excitement of her absence was eclipsed for the time by the turmoil of Cæsar's trouble. Standing in the dark on the top of the midden, he was shouting to the dairy door in a voice of thunder, which went off at the end of his beard like the puling of a cat.
So Pete made his way to Sulby, offered himself to Cæsar for service at the mill, and was taken on straightway at eighteenpence a week and his board. It was a curious household he entered into.
While at Cornaa, Cæsar had been a "local" on the preachers' plan, a class leader, and a chapel steward; but at Sulby he outgrew the Union and set up a "body" of his own. He called them "The Christians." a title that was at once a name, a challenge, and a protest. They worshipped in the long barn over Cæsar's mill, and held strong views on conduct.
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.
Philip sent for a carriage, and set off for Sulby immediately. The storm had increased by this time. Loud peals of thunder echoed in the hills. Forks of lightning licked the trunks of the trees and ran like serpents along the branches. As they were going by the church at Lezayre, the coachman reached over from the box, and said, "There's something going doing over yonder, sir. See?"
So it was arranged that Nancy should be made nurse and go to Elm Cottage, and that Mrs. Gorry should come in her place to Sulby. Throughout four-and-twenty hours thereafter, Kate tried her utmost to shut her heart to the child. At the end of that time, being left some minutes alone with the little one, she was heard singing to it in a sweet, low tone.
But the heart of a girl is a dark forest, and Kate had determined that, work or no work, so long a spell as six months Philip should not be away. One morning in the late spring there came to Douglas a startling and most appalling piece of news -Ross Christian was constantly seen at "The Manx Fairy." On the evening of that day Philip reappeared at Sulby.
Towards the dusk of evening Philip, in a tall silk hat over a jacket and knickerbockers, would come upon Pete by the Sulby bridge, washed, combed, and in a collar. Then there would be looks of great surprise on both sides. "What, Phil! Is it yourself, though? Just thought I'd see if the trouts were biting to-night. Dear me, this is Sulby too!
"Just before I went away, mother, Jonathan came to me and said, 'Sir, I hev confidence in human nature, generally speaking, but there's tricks and there's turns, and if I was you I would run no risks with them Manchester Sulbys'. Then he put the Sulby case before me, and if I had not taken his advice, I would have lost three hundred pounds.
After that he had "got religion," and he held that persons in the household of faith were not to drink, or to buy or to sell drink. But Grannie's father died and left his house, "The Manx Fairy," and his farm, Glenmooar, to her and her husband. About the same time the miller at Sulby also died, and the best mill in the island cried out for a tenant.
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