a bit of
surprise, for sure and all I could never see her settling down in the
parish."

"Them that are the wildest before marriage are often the best after,
and I think it will be like that with Kate."

"I hope so," said Annie. "And there is reason why it should be like
that. She must have liked Peter better than we thought; you will never
get me to believe that it was the priest's will or anybody's will that
brought Kate to do what she did."

"I hope she'll make my boy a good wife."

"I hope so, too," said Annie, and the women sat over the fire thinking
it out.

Annie Connex wore an apron, and a black straw hat; and her eyes were
young, and kind, and laughing, but Mrs. M'Shane, who had known her for
twenty years, often wondered what Annie would have been like if she had
not got a kind husband, and if good luck had not attended her all
through life.

"We never had anyone like her before in the parish. I hear she turned
round to her sister Julia, who was dressing her, and said, 'Now am I to
marry him, or shall I go to America?' And she was putting on her grey
dress at the time."

"She looked well in that grey dress; there was lace on the front of it,
and everyone said that a handsomer girl hasn't been married in the
parish for years. There isn't a man in the parish that would not be in
Peter's place to-day if he only dared."

"I don't catch your meaning, Mary."

"Well, perhaps I oughtn't to have said it now that she's my own
daughter, but I think many would have been a bit afraid of her after
what she said to the priest three days ago."

"She did have her tongue on him. People are telling all ends of
stories."

"Tis said that Father Maguire was up at the Kavanagh's three days ago,
and I heard that she hunted him. She called him a policeman, and a tax
collector, and a landlord, and if she said this she said more to a
priest than anyone ever said before. 'There are plenty of people in the
parish,' she said, 'who believe he could turn them into rabbits if he
liked.' As for the rabbits she isn't far from the truth, though I don't
take it on myself to say if it be a truth or a lie. But I know for a
fact that Patsy Rogan was going to vote for the Unionist to please his
landlord, but the priest had been to see his wife, who was going to be
confined, and didn't he tell her that if Patsy voted for the wrong man
there would be horns on the new baby, and Mrs. Rogan was so frightened
that she wouldn't let her husban