keep your feet to the fire; there's no need for a young man
like you to be taking your death with the wet because I've a thing to
say to ye.'

'You are not a Catholic now,' said he, raising his eyebrows with
intelligence as he glanced at a Bible and hymn-book that lay on the
floor beside her.

He was not unaccustomed to meeting perverts; it was impossible to have
any strong emotion about so frequent an occurrence. He had had a long
walk and the hot air of the room made him somewhat sleepy; if it had not
been for the fever and excitement of her mind he might not have picked
up more than the main facts of all she said. As it was, his attention
wandered for some minutes from the words that came from her palsied
lips. It did not wander from her; he was thinking who she might be, and
whether she was really about to die or not, and whether he had not
better ask Father M'Leod to come and see her himself. This last thought
indicated that she impressed him as a person of more importance and
interest than had been supposed when he had been sent to hear her
confession.

All this time, fired by a resolution to tell a tale for the first and
last time, the old woman, steadying as much as she might her shaking
head, and leaning forward to look at the priest with bleared yet
flashing eyes, was pouring out words whose articulation was often
indistinct. Her hand upon her staff was constantly moving, as if she
were about to rise and walk; her body seemed about to spring forward
with the impulse of her thoughts, the very folds of the scarlet bedgown
were instinct with excitement.

The priest's attention returned to her words.

'Yes, marry and marry and marry--that's what you priests in my young
days were for ever preaching to us poor folk. It was our duty to
multiply and fill the new land with good Cath'lics. Father Maloney, that
was his doctrine, and me a young girl just come out from the old country
with my parents, and six children younger than me. Hadn't I had enough
of young children to nurse, and me wanting to begin life in a new place
respectable, and get up a bit in the world? Oh, yes! but Father Maloney
he was on the look-out for a wife for Terry O'Brien. He was a widow man
with five little helpless things, and drunk most of the time was Terry,
and with no spirit in him to do better. Oh! but what did that matter to
Father Maloney when it was the good of the Church he was looking for,
wanting O'Brien's family looked after? O'