labours.
This Kathleen knew well, and she encouraged Mrs. Quirk to admire the
flowers and other decorations. The old lady readily did this, for she
was typically Irish in finding it far easier to give a generous measure
of encouragement than to blame the actions of another.

"It is you, Molly," she would say--at first, until corrected by the
girl, it had been Miss Molly--"that can put the flowers in their proper
places! It is a pleasure to come into the church and find the altar so
beautiful. Those carnations, now, they remind me of Heaven."

"It is dahlias they are, Mrs. Quirk," Molly would reply; "and out of
your own garden."

"Is it dahlias? Well, I am getting a little blind, Molly; but the
beauty is there, whatever the flowers may be."

Thus encouraged, Molly would speak of her proteges.

"Joe McCarthy told me the same, and he thinks more praise is due to you
than me. You send me the flowers every day."

"And why not? What better use for them? But which is Joe McCarthy?" Mrs.
Quirk might answer.

"Don't you know Joe? Such a good boy, but unfortunate. He was with
Regan, driving the cart, when the horse ran away and broke himself and
the cart into small pieces. It was a mercy Joe was not in the cart,"
Molly would continue.

"Poor lad! And that was a misfortune. Is he badly hurt?" Mrs. Quirk
would ask.

"Not hurt in his body, but dispirited. Regan discharged him without a
character. I went to him myself; it's a surly man he is. 'Why not give
the boy a testimonial?' I asked. 'It's the whip I will give him,' he
answered. That was all I got from Regan."

"And why was the man so heartless?" asked Mrs. Quirk.

"After all, Regan lost his horse and cart. You can scarcely blame him,"
Kathleen would explain.

"And hasn't he plenty of money to buy another? I have no patience with
Regan. And there is Joe, with a mother depending on him, out of work,
and with no testimonial to help him to another," Molly would reply.

The result would be a few shillings from the old lady's purse, which
Joe would probably spend on "a good thing," that would just fail to
secure a race, as "good things" so often do. But Molly Healy was never
discouraged by such trifles as these.

"What did you do with the money, Joe?" she would ask.

"It was Harry Price told me to invest it on Blue Peter."

"I told you to take it home to your mother. Shame on you, Joe, to be
wasting her food on horses."

"It was like this. 'Would you be making