It was something she had never felt before, though almost any other woman would have diagnosed at once. It was, in fact, nothing less than her first twinge of jealousy.
She chose to forget all the wise precepts by which she had regulated Stair's conduct toward her. She forgot how she had carefully explained to him that all the duties were to be on his side, and all the benefits on hers.
"He did not even shake hands," she thought, looking at the wrist which the Prince and other great gentlemen has so often fervently kissed, "and yet he can stop to pat that dog's head!"
Nobody had told Patsy that marriage is a dish that cannot be eaten by one while the other looks on. She had chosen her way. She had carried it through, and now in spite of the luminous explanations which she had given Stair as to their relative positions and duties, he had chosen to misunderstand, and had marched off straight as a ramrod.
And she caught herself murmuring over and over to herself, "Stiff-necked and rebellious--stiff-necked and rebellious!"
It was to Stair she referred, but the accompanying stamp of the little foot might possibly have raised doubts as to the correctness of her application, had any been there to see.
Stair Garland slept little that night. He wandered in the cool purple darkness here and there about the island, listening to the curious noises of the birds, complaining vaguely, or calling one to the other from the rocky ledges. He was conscious of the perpetual drumming of the sea in his ears, as the tide ran, jostled in the narrow reaches, and hammered without ceasing on the outer cliffs of the little island.
The pair of cows were company to him. He wondered whence they came and who had placed them there. They did not waste their time, but munched steadily at the lush grasses in the interior meadow of the isle--the hollow palm of its hand, as it were. The problem took his mind for a while off his own miseries.
Some one had been there. Some one had been accustomed to tend and milk them. It could not be his sister Jean, for she could not have been long enough spared from the farm at Glenanmays. Who, then, had provided all that they found waiting for them? The poultry he had penned in darkness, so that their early crowing might not awaken Patsy. She must know. She had prepared all this. She had prepared everything. Even his own delivery from prison, even the great muster of the Bands to override authority and save him, were only little dove-tailings in the scheme which Patsy had designed for her own liberation.