ue, though, it's very, very dirty; it's a bad tongue altogether.
My mother had a tongue like that, Mary, when she died."

"Have you any pain?" said her daughter.

"No, dearie; there is a buzz in the front of my head as if something
was spinning round and round very quickly, and that makes my eyes
tired, and there's a sort of feeling as if my head was twice as heavy
as it should be. Hang up the glass again. I'll try and get a sleep,
and maybe I'll be better when I waken up. Run you out and get a bit of
steak, and we'll stew it down and make beef tea, and maybe that will
do me good. Give me my purse out of the pocket of my skirt."

Mary found the purse and brought it to the bed. Her mother opened it
and brought out a thimble, a bootlace, five buttons, one sixpenny
piece and a penny. She gave Mary the sixpence.

"Get half a pound of leg beef," said she, "and then we'll have
fourpence left for bread and tea; no, take the other penny, too, and
get half a pound of pieces at the butcher's for twopence and a
twopenny tin of condensed milk, that's fourpence, and a three ha'penny
loaf and one penny for tea, that's sixpence ha'penny, and get onions
with the odd ha'penny, and we'll put them in the beef tea. Don't
forget, dearie, to pick lean bits of meat; them fellows do be always
trying to stick bits of bone and gristle on a body. Tell him it's for
beef tea for your mother, and that I'm not well at all, and ask how
Mrs. Quinn is; she hasn't been down in the shop for a long time. I'll
go to sleep now. I'll have to go to work in the morning whatever
happens, because there isn't any money in the house at all. Come home
as quick as you can, dearie."

Mary dressed herself and went out for the provisions, but she did not
buy them at once. As she went down the street she turned suddenly,
clasping her hands in a desperate movement, and walked very quickly
in the opposite direction. She turned up the side streets to the
quays, and along these to the Park Gates. Her hands were clasping and
unclasping in an agony of impatience, and her eyes roved busily here
and there, flying among the few pedestrians like lanterns. She went
through the gates and up the broad central path, and here she walked
more slowly: but she did not see the flowers behind the railings, or
even the sunshine that bathed the world in glory. At the monument she
sped a furtive glance down the road she had traveled--there was nobody
behind her. She turned into the fields