plucked up heart from the time she was certain that the
baby was coming. I don't think now that she expected to live through
it. She probably thought that through that gate she would rejoin
Katie. She was very sweet to her husband in those days, very gentle
and considerate to the neighbours, to whom she had often been peevish
and haughty in old times. Many a one changed their former opinion of
her that winter, and her kindness made kindness for her. This
neighbour would often help her at the washing-tub, and that would send
her grown boy in at dinner-time to see if Katie's mother wanted wood
chopped or water carried. I am always glad to think of those four or
five months, when a great calm, as it seems to me, settled down on the
little house in the fields.

The baby was born in April--dead, as people had feared. It was a boy,
and had died in being born. They said the little waxen image bore
traces of a pathetic struggle for life. As for the mother, she never
rallied at all; I think she would not. She passed away quite calmly,
with not a flutter of the eyelids to answer her husband, who prayed
for a parting word from her.

They sleep together, mother and children, in Kilbride, in the shadow
of a great thorn-bush, and not far from St. Brigid's Tower. Lonely and
far as the churchyard is, there is not a Sunday in the year that the
husband and father does not find his way there after mass, trudging
along that solitary way, between bare hedges or blooming, as
faithfully as the day comes round. All those things were over a dozen
years ago, and he is married again, to a spare, unattractive woman,
who looks after his food and clothes, and makes him in her way a very
excellent wife. She was long past middle age when he married her and
took her out of service. But there was no pretence of love-making
about it. She would be the first herself to tell you that her man's
heart was in Kilbride. She said to me once: 'He's a good man to me,
and I'm glad to do my duty by him; but if you talked to him about his
wife he'd think you meant Kitty, God rest her! Men's seconds, miss,
don't count.'

She said it in a simple, open-faced way, but I thought there was a
homely tragedy concealed behind it. I am sure that in the heaven, of
which those Irish peasants think as confidently as of the next room,
he will forget all about poor hard-working Margaret, and will look
with eager eyes for the love of his youth.

X

THE DEATH SPANCEL