d then and trotted
back quickly to the farmhouse, from whence no one's coaxing afterwards
could bring her. Every one wanted that the poor mother should have her
as she seemed to crave, but the cat would not; she escaped over and
over from her captors, and at last we gave up trying to constrain her,
though her desertion seemed a new cruelty to the stricken woman across
the fields.

I don't know how many months the mother's weeping went on. It was a
day close upon Christmas when I opened the half-door and went in and
saw, for the first time since the child's death, that her eyes were
dry. She was making bread at a table under the window, and her face
had grown wonderfully calm since I had last seen her. I made no
remark, but she led up to the subject herself, with a pathetic,
wintry smile.

'You remember the poem you read to me one day, miss,' she said, 'about
the dead child that couldn't be glad in heaven because its mother's
crying wet its fine dress?' I remembered perfectly; it was my poor
little way of trying to insinuate some comfort, for like many of her
class in Ireland, she loved poetry. 'Well,' she went on, 'I've been
thinking a power over it since. Who knows but that there might be the
truth behind it?' I nodded assent. 'Now there's Christmas coming,' she
said, 'and I think that would be a fine time for the children in
heaven, so I'm not going to spoil Katie's glory among them.'

She didn't say much more after this curious little bit of confidence,
but it was a comfort to every one when she left off crying. Her
husband was rejoiced at the change. He began to build on it that
presently she would be cheerful once more, and they would be quite
happy again; for a man doesn't miss a child as a woman does, and, dear
as his little Katie was, the love of his boyhood was yet spared to
him, and could still make earth paradise if she would.

However, there was a new cause for apprehension in those latter days.
I remember that the women shook their heads and looked gloomy when it
came to be known that Katie's mother was likely to have a baby in the
spring. She had been very ill before, and after this long interval and
all the trouble things were not likely to go easier with her. I know
the old doctor, who was kind and fatherly, and had been full of sorrow
about Katie, seemed vexed at the new turn of affairs. I heard him
telling a matron much in his confidence that he wouldn't answer for
the woman's life.

She herself