it
on her, all the work fell to the mother's share.

The girl's time was upon her before the mother guessed at the blinding
and awful truth. She was a proud, stern, old woman, come of a race
strong in rectitude, and she would scarcely have believed an angel if
one had come to testify to her daughter's dishonour. But the time came
when it could no longer be hidden, when the birth-pains were on the
wretched girl, and in the quietness of the winter night, her sin stood
forth revealed.

Some merciful paralysis stiffened the mother's lips when she would
have cursed her daughter. She lifted up her voice indeed to curse, but
it went from her; her lips jabbered helplessly; over her face came a
bluish-gray shade, and she fell in a chair huddled with one hand
pressed against her side.

The two men came in on this ghastly scene. The girl was crouched on
the floor with her face hidden, shrinking to the earth from the
terrible words she expected to hear. The men lifted the sister to her
bed in the little room. They forced some spirit between their mother's
lips, and in a few minutes the livid dark shade began to pass from her
face. Her lips moved. 'Take her,' she panted, 'take that girl and her
shame from my honest house, lest I curse her.'

The two men looked at each other. They turned pale through their hardy
brownness, and then flushed darkly red. It flashed on them in an
instant. This was the meaning of the girl's sickness, of a thousand
hints they had not understood. Tom, with characteristic patience, was
the first to bend his back to the burden.

'Whisht, mother,' he said, 'whisht. Don't talk about cursing. If
there's one black sin under our roof-tree, we won't open the door to
another.' He put his arm round her in a tender way. 'Come, achora,' he
said, as if he were humouring a child, 'come and lie down. You're not
well, you creature.'

'Oh Tom,' said the mother, softening all at once, 'the black shame's
on me, and I'll never be well again in this world.'

She let him lift her to her bed in one of the little rooms that went
off the kitchen. Then he came back to where Larry stood, with an acute
misery on his young face, looking restlessly from the turf sods he was
kicking now and again to the door behind which their young sister lay
in agony.

'There's no help for it, Larry,' said Tom, touching him on the
shoulder. 'We can't trust her and the mother under one roof. We must
take her to the hospital. It's low water to