“Let me take the roses,” I said as well as I could, for I could scarcely say anything.

“I brought them for you,” she said, and then she laughed, a little confusedly, at her own forgetfulness.

“To be sure they’re nothing to the green-house ones you’ll have at the Castle, but I thought you’d like them for all that.  They’re from the tree outside the window of your own little room.  We call it your room still—­the one you slept in when you came in your little velvet frock and pinnie, singing carols to my door.  ‘Mary O’Neill’s room,’ Martin called it then, and it’s been the same to us ever since.”

This touched me so deeply that, before I knew what I was doing, I was putting my arm about her waist and asking her to tell me what she wished me to do and I would do it.

“Will you, though?” she said, and then one by one she propounded the artless little schemes she had concocted to cure Martin of what she conceived to be his love for me.

Her first thought was that I might make excuse of my father’s illness to remain where I was until the time came for Martin to leave the island; but she repented of this almost immediately, remembering that Martin was set on seeing me, (’I must see her,’ he had said) and if he did not see me he would be so downhearted.

Then she thought I might praise up my husband to Martin, saying what a fine man he was to be sure, and how good he had been to me, and what a proud woman I was to be married to him; but she was ashamed of that almost as soon as she had said it, for it might not be true, and Martin might see I was pretending.

Finally, she suggested that in order to create a coolness between Martin and myself I might try not to be so nice to him, speaking short to him sometimes, and even harsh and angry; but no, that would be too cruel, especially from me, after all these years, just when he was going so far away, too, and only the Lord and the blessed saints knew what was to become of him.

It was Martin, Martin, always Martin.  Still in her sweet motherly selfishness she could think of nobody else.  Fondly as she loved me, it never occurred to her for a moment that if I did what she wished and sent Martin away from me, I too would suffer.  But a harder heart than mine would have melted at the sight of her perplexity and distress, and when with a helpless look she said: 

“I don’t know what you are to do—­I really, really don’t,” I comforted her (needing comfort so much myself), and told her I would find a way of my own to do what she desired.

“Will you, though?” she said.

“Indeed I will.”

“And you won’t send him away sore-hearted, either?”

“Indeed I won’t.”

“I knew you would say that.  May the Lord and His holy Mother bless you!”

She was weeping tender, copious, blessed tears by this time, but there were smiles behind them.

“Not that there’s another woman in the world I would rather give him to if things were as they used to be.  But they’re different now, are they not?” she asked.