“Bridget O’Neill,” cried my mother, rising up from her chair, “you are a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition.  You know as well as I do that it wasn’t Mary who made me ill, but you—­you, who reproached me and taunted me about my child until my heart itself had to bleed.  For seven years you have been doing that, and now you are disposing of my darling over my head without consulting me.  Has a mother no rights in her own child—­the child she has suffered for, and loved and lived for—­that other people who care nothing for it should take it away from her and send it into a foreign country where she may never see it again?  But you shall not do that!  No, you shall not’!  As long as there’s breath in my body you shall not do it, and if you attempt. . . .”

In her wild excitement my mother had lifted one of her trembling hands into Aunt Bridget’s face while the other was still clasped about me, when suddenly, with a look of fear on her face, she stopped speaking.  She had heard a heavy step on the stairs.  It was my father.  He entered the room with his knotty forehead more compressed than usual and said: 

“What’s this she shall not do?”

My mother dropped back into her seat in silence, and Aunt Bridget, wiping’ her eyes on her black apron—­she only wept when my father was present—­proceeded to explain.

It seems I am a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition and though, I’ve been up early and late and made myself a servant for seven years I’m only in this house to turn my sister’s child out of it.  It seems too, that we have no business—­none of us have—­to say what ought to be done for this girl—­her mother being the only person who has any rights in the child, and if we attempt . . .”

“What’s that?”

In his anger and impatience my father could listen no longer and in his loud voice he said: 

“Since when has a father lost control of his own daughter?  He has to provide for her, hasn’t he?  If she wants anything it’s to him she has to look for it, isn’t it?  That’s the law I guess, eh?  Always has been, all the world over.  Then what’s all this hustling about?”

My mother made a feeble effort to answer him.

“I was only saying, Daniel . . .”

“You were saying something foolish and stupid.  I reckon a man can do what he likes with his own, can’t he?  If this girl is my child and I say she is to go somewhere, she is to go.”  And saying this my father brought down his thick hand with a thump on to a table.

It was the first time he had laid claim to me, and perhaps that acted on my mother, as she said, submissively: 

“Very well, dear. You know best what is best for Mary, and if you say—­you and Bridget and . . . and Father Dan. . . .”

“I do say, and that’s enough.  So just go to work and fix up this Convent scheme without future notice.  And hark here, let me see for the future if a man can’t have peace from these two-cent trifles for his important business.”