hought it was quite possible, till the time when
the enchantment would cease.

Their chief reason for looking with joy to this day was that then their
mother would be quite well, and their anxiety about her would be over.
Twice a day they went to her room--to bid her good-morning and
good-night. Then she read them a chapter from the Bible, and made them
promise to say their prayers. From her they got their ideas of God's
terrible judgments, and of the Last Day, when the heavens would roll
back like a scroll, and they would be caught up in the clouds. Jane
was afraid it might happen when she was bathing some day, and she would
be caught up in her bare skin. She always put her boots and stockings
under her pillow when she went to bed, in case it came like a thief in
the night. Occasionally Mrs Darragh was well enough to forget her own
trouble, and then she would keep the children with her, and tell them
stories of the time when she was a child. These were the children's
happiest days. They would sit on the floor round her sofa, listening,
fascinated by her description of a life so unlike their own. Their
mother, like a child in a book, had never gone outside the garden gates
without her nurse, and they laughed at the difference between their
life and hers. She never went fishing, and brought home enough fish to
feed her family for three days; she never tramped for miles over
mountains or spent whole days catching glasen off the rocks. The
country she had lived in had been different, too--a red-roofed village,
where every cottage had a garden neat and trim, and all the children
had rosy cheeks and tidy yellow hair. But on their mother's bad days,
when she remembered another past, they would creep to her door, and
listen with troubled faces to her wild talk of sins and punishment, and
hear her praying for forgiveness and death. Their love for their
mother was a passionate devotion, and through it came the only real
trouble they knew--they were afraid that God would answer her prayer,
and take her from them. So her bad days came to mean days of black
misery for them, when they spent their time beseeching God not to take
her prayers seriously: it was only because she was ill that she thought
she wanted to die, and would have changed her mind by the morning. If
after one of these bad days a stormy night followed, misery changed to
terror. On such a night the Banshee had wailed for their grandmother,
and if they