“Both of ’em, thanks to yo’, dear ol’ Grand-dad,” Muriel said. Then, kissing him good-night, she went up to her little loft room. But when she was snugly in her bed it was not of Billy Bones that she dreamed.
Muriel awakened the next morning with a song in her heart that she was soon expressing in clear, sweet notes which told the listener how glad, glad the singer was just to be alive.
Captain Ezra, busying himself near the open kitchen door, sighed softly as he realized that this wordless song was different from the others that Muriel had sung in the mornings that were past as she prepared their simple breakfast.
There had been words to those other songs, sometimes hymns that the lassie had memorized from having often heard them repeated at the meeting-house, whither she had been permitted to go when the summer colony was closed. Then again, there had been times when she had set words of her own to the meeting-house tunes; lilting melodies they were of winging gulls and of the mermaids who lived in the sea. But this morning there was a new and eager joyousness in the girl’s singing. For the first time in her fifteen years, the gates of her prison had been flung wide and she had stepped out into a strange world, timidly, perhaps, but soon forgetting herself in her delight at what she had found, a world of books, of young companionship, of adventure and romance. Muriel, even if she were again imprisoned, would never be quite the same. But the newly awakened love in the heart of Captain Ezra had been the key that had opened the door for his “gal,” and she was now free to come and go as she wished, because he trusted her. She would not leave him without telling him nor would he detain her if she wished to go.
“Top o’ the mornin’ to you, Grand-dad,” she called, when the fish were done to a turn and the potatoes were crispy brown. “I’ve a mind to be bakin’ today,” she continued when he was seated at the table. “Some o’ those wee Irishy cakes that Uncle Barney taught me how to make, just like his ‘auld’ mother did. He’s allays askin’ for ’em when he docks at Windy Island. He’s been laid up so long, I cal’late the taste of ’em might be cheerin’ him, wouldn’t you reckon they might, Grand-dad?”