he fowl. On Sundays and holidays she went to mass to the
Island Chapel, but gave no encouragement to those who would have gone
a step of the road home with her. The Island women used to wonder how
she could bear the loneliness.--'Why, God be betune us and harm!'
they often said, 'Sure the crathur might be robbed and murdhered any
night of the year and no wan the wiser.' And so she might, if the
Island possessed robbers and murderers in its midst. But it is a
primitively innocent little community, which sleeps with open doors as
often as not, and there is nothing to tempt marauders or even beggars
to migrate there.

By and by a feeling got about that Margret must be saving money. Her
wage as a henwife was no great thing, but then, as they said, 'she
looked as if she lived on the smell of an oil-rag,' and there was
plenty of food to be had in the Hall kitchen, where Margret waited
with her eggs and fowl every morning. Certainly her clothes, though
decent, were worn well-nigh threadbare. But the feelers that the
neighbours sent out towards Margret met with no solid assurance. Grim
and taciturn, Margret kept her own counsel, and was like enough to
keep it till the day of her death.

Jack Laffan, Margret's brother, is the village carpenter, a sociable
poor man, not the least bit in the world like his sister. Jack is
rather fond of idling over a glass with his cronies in the
public-house, but, as he is well under Mrs. Jack's thumb, the habit is
not likely to grow on him inconveniently. There are four daughters and
a son, a lad of fifteen or thereabouts. Two of the daughters are
domestic servants out in the big world, and are reported to wear
streamers to their caps and fine lace aprons every day. Another is
handmaiden to Miss Bell at the post office, and knows the contents of
all the letters, except Father Tiernay's, before the people they
belong to. Fanny is at home with her father and mother, and is
supposed to be too fond of fal-lals, pinchbeck brooches and cheap
ribbons, which come to her from her sisters out in the world. She
often talks of emigration, and is not sought after by the young men of
the Island, who regard her as a 'vain paycocky thing.'

Mrs. Jack has the reputation of being a hard, managing woman. There
was never much love lost between her and Margret, and when the latter
came back from her six years' absence on the mainland, Mrs. Jack's
were perhaps the most ill-natured surmises as to the reasons for
M