doing wrong, is she?  Maybe she is, the boght millish, maybe we all are, ma’am, and have need of God’s mercy and forgiveness.  But I never heard that praying is the only kind of penance He asks of us, ma’am.  And if it is, I wouldn’t trust but there are poor women who are praying as well when they’re working over their wash-tubs as some ones when they’re saying their rosaries and singing their Tantum Ergos. . . .”

Another interruption and then—­“There’s Bella Kinnish herself who keeps the corner shop, ma’am.  Her husband was lost at the ‘mackerel’ two years for Easter.  He left her with three little children and a baby unborn, and Bella’s finding it middling hard to get a taste of butcher’s meat, or even a bit of loaf-bread itself for them, ma’am.  And when she’s sitting late at night, as the doctor’s telling me, and all the rest of the village dark, darning little Liza’s stockings, and patching little Willie’s coat, or maybe nursing the baby when it’s down with the measles, the Lord is as pleased with her, I’m thinking, as with some of your nun bodies in their grand blue cloaks taking turn and turn to kneel before the tabernacle.”

There was another rumble of apologetic voices after that (both Father Dan’s and the Reverend Mother’s), and then came Christian Ann’s clear notes again, breaking fast, though, and sometimes threatening to stop.

“What’s that you’re saying, ma’am? . . .  Motherhood a sacred and holy state also?  ’Deed it is, ma’am!  That’s truth enough too, though some ones who shut themselves up in convents don’t seem to think so. . . .  A mother’s a mother, and what’s more, her child is her child, wedlock or no wedlock.  And if she’s doing right by her little one, and bringing it up well, and teaching it true, I don’t know that when her time comes the Lord will be asking her which side of her wedding-day it was born on. . . .

“As for Mary O’Neill, ma’am, when you’re talking and talking about her saving her soul, you’re forgetting she has her child to save too, ma’am.  God gave her the boght villish, and is she to run away from it?  It’s a fine blessing would be on her for that, isn’t it? . . .  Father Dan, I’m surprised at you—­such a terrible, cruel, shocking, unnatural thing as you’re thinking.  I thought you were a better man than that—­I really did. . . .  And as for some ones that call themselves Mothers, they’re no mothers at all and never will be—­tempting a poor woman in her trouble to leave her child to be a charge on other people. . . .”

Still another rumble of soft voices and then—­

“Not that I’m thinking of myself, ma’am.  Dear heart, no!  It’s only too eager I’d be to have the lil angel to myself.  There she is on the hearthrug, ma’am, and if anything happens to Mary O’Neill, it’s there she’ll be for the rest of my life, and it’s sorry I am for the darling’s sake that my time cannot be longer. . . .