Elleney’s gay little laugh trilled out again, and she shot a glance of confiding gratitude from under her thick dark lashes in the direction of the young baker which set the honest fellow’s heart dancing, though he well knew how little such innocent warmth meant.

“God bless her,” he murmured as he returned to his toasting fork; “if a dog done anything for her she’d look at it the same.  If she wasn’t the mistress’s niece itself, ye might whistle for her, Pat, me boy.”

Meanwhile Elleney had gone staggering along the passage with her heavy tray, and now bumped it against the parlour door as an intimation that she would like some one to open it.

This unspoken request was acceded to so suddenly that she almost fell forward into the room.

“I was waitin’ on the eggs,” she explained hurriedly, as she recovered her balance and tottered forward with her burden; “but here they are for yous now, and the tea is wet this good bit, an’ the toast is very near ready.”

The room was full of women; no less than eight of them sat expectantly round the empty board.  Besides Mrs. McNally herself and her four daughters, three nieces had been added to her family on the death of their mother, Mrs. McNally’s only sister.

“Sure they’re all the same as me own,” the good woman was wont to say, looking round affectionately at the girls.  “There’s times when I have to be thinkin’ which is which—­upon me honour, there is.”  And thereupon she would roll her broad shoulders, and wink with both eyes together after her own good-natured fashion; and no one who lived in the house with her could doubt that she spoke the truth.

Elleney had only recently been added to the group; she spoke of the head of the house as “me a’nt,” but she was in truth no relation to the kindly soul who had taken compassion on her destitute condition, being a niece of the late Mr. McNally’s first wife.  Perhaps no other woman in the world would thus have admitted her to a circle already somewhat inconveniently large; but, as Mrs. McNally said, “One more or less didn’t make much differ, an’ sure the Lord ’ud be apt to make it up to her, an’ Elleney was a useful little girl, a great hand at her needle, an’ with a wonderful turn for business, God bless her.”

Mrs. McNally invariably alluded to the odd little house where her many avocations were carried on as her “establishment,” and spoke habitually of “the business.”  It would have been hard to define the precise nature of this business.  There was a bakery attached to it, over which Pat Rooney presided, driving round the country each afternoon with the results of his labours.  Juliana and Henrietta McNally sold groceries at one counter, and Matilda and Maria sold calico and flannel and boots at another.  Hams and stockings hung in parallel lines from the ceiling, and there was a mysterious little railed-off chamber at the back of the house, reached by a swing door, on which the word “Bar” was set