Sometime in the afternoon (heaven knows when) I went back to Sunny Lodge.  The house was very quiet.  Baby was babbling on the hearth-rug.  My mother was silent and trying not to let me see her swollen eyes.  My dear one was sleeping, had been sleeping all day long, the sleep of an angel.  Strange and frightening fact, nobody being able to remember that she had ever been seen to sleep before!

After a while, sick and cold at heart, I went down to the shore where we had played as children.  The boat we sailed in was moored on the beach.  The tide was far out, making a noise on the teeth of the Rock, which stood out against the reddening sky, stern, grand, gloomy.

Old Tommy the Mate came to the door of his cabin.  I went into the quiet smoky place with its earthen floor and sat in a dull torpor by the hearth, under the sooty “laff” and rafters.  The old man did not say a word to me.  He put some turf on the fire and then sat on a three-legged stool at the other side of the hearth-place.

Once he got up and gave me a basin of buttermilk, then stirred the peats and sat down again without speaking.  Towards evening, when the rising sea was growing louder, I got up to go.  The old man followed me to the door, and there, laying his hand on my arm he said: 

“She’s been beating to windward all her life, boy.  But mind ye this—­she’s fetching the harbour all right at last.”

Going up the road I heard a band of music in the distance, and saw a procession of people coming down.  It was Father Dan’s celebration of thanksgiving to God for what was left of Daniel O’Neill’s ill-gotten wealth sent back from Rome for the poor.

Being in no humour to thank God for anything, I got over a sod hedge and crossed a field until I came to a back gate to our garden, near to “William Rufus’s” burial place—­stone overgrown with moss, inscription almost obliterated.

On the path I met my mother, with baby, toddling and tumbling by her side.

“How is she now?” I asked.

She was awake—­had been awake these two hours, but in a strange kind of wakefulness, her big angel eyes open and shining like stars as if smiling at someone whom nobody else could see, and her lips moving as if speaking some words which nobody else could hear.

“What art thou saying, boght millish?” my mother had asked, and after a moment in which she seemed to listen in rapture, my darling had answered: 

“Hush!  I am speaking to mamma—­telling her I am leaving Isabel with Christian Ann.  And she is saying she is very glad.”

We walked round to the front of the house until we came close under the window of “Mary O’Neill’s little room,” which was wide open.

The evening was so still that we could hear the congregation singing in the church and on the path in front of it.

Presently somebody began to sing in the room above.  It was my darling—­in her clear sweet silvery voice which I have never heard the like of in this world and never shall again.