“They sent him home then.  We thought he was cured entirely.  He pulled out the summer, but he had that langersome way with him through all.”

She was silent a moment, then she looked at Christian, with grief, crowned and omnipotent, on her tragic brow.

“As long as he was alive, I had courage in spite of all, but when I thinks now of them days, and the courage I had, it goes through me!” Her red-brown eyes stared through the open door at the path twisting across the field to the high road.

“Ye’ll never see him on that road again, and when I looks up it me heart gets dark.  Sure, now when he’s gone, I thinks often, if he’d be lyin’ par’lysed above in the bed, I’d be runnin’ about happy!”

When Christian went home Mrs. Barry walked with her to the little green bridge, and stood there until her visitor reached the bend of the river where the path passed from her sight.

At the turning Christian looked back and saw the lonely figure standing at the bridge-head, and again she said to herself:  “Here am I, angry and whimpering!”

CHAPTER XXXVI

Doctor Mangan told himself that he had never laid out a ten-pound note to better advantage than the one he had pushed into the heel of Tishy’s fist.  It had, as he thought it would, clinched the matter.  He had never been unaware of the menace of Cloherty, R.A.M.C., but he was confident in the three forces that he had at his command—­authority, bribery, and propinquity.

“If I know my young lady,” he said cheerfully to himself, “she’ll think more of Larry at her elbow, than of that foxy devil back at Riverstown” (which was the present scene of Captain Cloherty’s professional labours).  “And what’s more, if Tishy will only give her mind to it, it’ll take a stiffer lad than Master Larry to be man enough for her!  She downed him once, and she’ll do it again, in spite of Christian Lowry!”

Even as the Big Doctor thought, there were many more that fought for him in this matter than against him.  Potent had been his suggestion to his daughter that there wasn’t a girl in Cluhir that wouldn’t “be gibeing at her” if she lost so golden an opportunity, nor one that would believe she had not half hanged herself to secure it. (And though it has not been possible to include them in this chronicle, it may be accepted that there were many girls in Cluhir of the lively malevolence of whose gibes Tishy was entirely sensible.) Even more potent was the pull of Larry’s position, the prestige of his money, of his “place,” of his good looks; most potent of all, the fact of his nearness, the mere primary fact that he was a young man, in whose company she was daily thrown, whose unattached status (the Doctor had kept his own counsel as to that interview with Christian, and his deductions therefrom) was a continual challenge to her charms, whose mere presence was an excitement an a stimulus.