ray well in Achill, having a
sure hold on that heavenly country which is to atone for the cruelty
and sorrow of this. In process of time they will come to think of her
as a mermaid, poor little Moya. She had loved her husband at least
with a warm human love. But his open grave was filled after they had
given up hoping that the sea would again give her up, and the place by
Patrick Lavelle's side remains for ever empty.

IX

KATIE

The little house where Katie lived was over the fields. She was a
dimpled, brown child, as soft as the yellow ducklings she used to
carry in her pinafore. Her little fat shoulders were bare as I
remember them, and you could see the line where the sunburn ended with
her frock and the whiteness began. She was the late child of a
long-married couple, vouchsafed long after they had given up hopes of
a living child.

Her mother was an angular woman who walked a little crookedly,
throwing one hip into ungainly prominence as she went. Her face, too,
was brown as a russet apple, with a pleasant hard redness on the
cheeks. She had white teeth, brown eyes, and an honest expression.
But people said she was a difficult woman to live with. She had
extreme ideas of her own importance, especially since the honest
fellow she was married to had become steward to his master, a 'strong
farmer,' as they say in Ireland, and the owner of broad acres. She
expected a certain deference from the folk she had grown up amongst,
and who were often not quite inclined to yield it. In a sense she was
a fortunate woman, for her good man was as much a lover as in the days
when he had come whistling his lover's signal, like any blackbird, to
call her out from her mother's chimney-corner. She told me about those
days herself when I was but a callow girl. I don't know why, except
from some spirit of romance in her, which she could not reveal to folk
of her own age and circumstances. She was the mother of many dead
babies, for never a one had lived but Katie; but the romance of her
marriage was still new. I remember one summer evening, when the low
sun shone between the slats of her dairy window, and I, on a creepy
stool by the wall, alternately read _The Arabian Nights_ and talked
to her while she gathered the butter from the churn, that her man came
in, and, not seeing me in the shadow, drew her head back and kissed
her brown face and head with a passion not all common after courting
days.

The house was by the ro