"Terry,
wherever ye may be, I have done the best deed for you and your children,
for if you were innocent you have gone to a better place, and if it were
sin to live as you did, the less of it you have on your soul the better
for you; and as for the children, poor lambs, I can give them a start
in the world now I am rid of you!" That's what I said in my heart to
O'Brien at first--when I grieved for him; and then the years passed, and
I worked too hard to be thinking of him.

'And now, when I sit here facing the death for myself, I can look out of
my windows there back and see the canal, and I say to Terry again, as if
I was coming face to face with him, that I did the best deed I could do
for him and his. I broke with the Cath'lic Church long ago, for I
couldn't go to confess; and many's the year that I never thought of
religion. But now that I am going to die I try to read the books my
daughter's minister gives me, and I look to God and say that I've sins
on my soul, but the drowning of O'Brien, as far as I know right from
wrong, isn't one of them.'

The young priest had an idea that the occasion demanded some strong form
of speech. 'Woman,' he said, 'what have you told me this for?'

The strength of her excitement was subsiding. In its wane the
afflictions of her age seemed to be let loose upon her again. Her words
came more thickly, her gaunt frame trembled the more, but not for one
moment did her eye flinch before his youthful severity.

'I hear that you priests are at it yet. "Marry and marry and marry,"
that's what ye teach the poor folks that will do your bidding, "in
order that the new country may be filled with Cath'lics," and I thought
before I died I'd just let ye know how one such marriage turned; and as
he didn't come himself you may go home and tell Father M'Leod that, God
helping me, I have told you the truth.'

The next day an elderly priest approached the door of the same house.
His hair was grey, his shoulders bent, his face was furrowed with those
benign lines which tell that the pain which has graven them is that
sympathy which accepts as its own the sorrows of others. Father M'Leod
had come far because he had a word to say, a word of pity and of
sympathy, which he hoped might yet touch an impenitent heart, a word
that he felt was due from the Church he represented to this wandering
soul, whether repentance should be the result or not.

When he rang the bell it was not the young girl but her mo