An Isle in the Water by Katharine Tynan

The Island people seldom marry outside the Island. They are passionately devoted to each other, but as a rule look coldly upon the stranger. Swarthy Spanish sailors put in sometimes, and fair-skinned, black-eyed Greeks, and broad-shouldered Norwegians, all as ripe for love as any other sailor, but that they should carry away an Island girl to their outlandish places over sea is a thing almost unheard of. The Island girls are courted by their own blue-jerseyed fisher-lads -- and what a place for love-making, with the ravines and caves in the cliff-sides, and the deep glens in the heart of the Island, so lonely except for the lord's red deer and little fierce black cattle. Why, if one of those foreign sailors attempted love-making with an Island lass, just as likely as not a pair of little brown fists would rattle about his amazed ears; the girls there know how to defend their dignity.

But one spring there was a sensation little short of a scandal when it became known that Mary Cassidy, the handsomest girl of the Island, was keeping company with a Spanish sailor who had come into harbour on a Glasgow barque. The stage of keeping company was not long. So violent was the passion that flamed up between the two that there was no gainsaying it. Mary was the one girl in a family of five tall fishermen. Father and mother were dead -- the father drowned in a wild night while trying to make the treacherous mouth of the inadequate harbour, the mother dead of her grief. Mary had known fathering and mothering both from the brothers. She was the youngest of them all, and their pride and glory.