which still were not strong enough to drive them from their purposes.  To linger there among the rocks seemed to be the only delight left to her in life,—­except that intense delight which a mother has in loving her child.  She herself read but little, and never put a hand upon the piano.  But she had a faculty of sitting and thinking, of brooding over her own past years and dreaming of her daughter’s future life, which never deserted her.  With her the days were doubtless very sad, but it cannot truly be said that they were dull or tedious.

And there was a sparkle of humour about her too, which would sometimes shine the brightest when there was no one by her to appreciate it.  Her daughter would smile at her mother’s sallies,—­but she did so simply in kindness.  Kate did not share her mother’s sense of humour,—­did not share it as yet.  With the young the love of fun is gratified generally by grotesque movement.  It is not till years are running on that the grotesqueness of words and ideas is appreciated.  But Mrs. O’Hara would expend her art on the household drudge, or on old Barney Corcoran who came with the turf,—­though by neither of them was she very clearly understood.  Now and again she would have a war of words with the priest, and that, I think, she liked.  She was intensely combative, if ground for a combat arose; and would fight on any subject with any human being—­except her daughter.  And yet with the priest she never quarrelled; and though she was rarely beaten in her contests with him, she submitted to him in much.  In matters touching her religion she submitted to him altogether.

Kate O’Hara was in face very like her mother;—­strangely like, for in much she was very different.  But she had her mother’s eyes,—­though hers were much softer in their lustre, as became her youth,—­and she had her mother’s nose, but without that look of scorn which would come upon her mother’s face when the nostrils were inflated.  And in that peculiar shortness of the lower face she was the very echo of her mother.  But the mouth was smaller, the lips less full, and the dimple less exaggerated.  It was a fairer face to look upon,—­fairer, perhaps, than her mother’s had ever been; but it was less expressive, and in it there was infinitely less capability for anger, and perhaps less capability for the agonising extremes of tenderness.  But Kate was taller than her mother, and seemed by her mother’s side to be slender.  Nevertheless she was strong and healthy; and though she did not willingly join in those longer walks, or expose herself to the weather as did her mother, there was nothing feeble about her, nor was she averse to action.  Life at Ardkill Cottage was dull, and therefore she also was dull.  Had she been surrounded by friends, such as she had known in her halcyon school days at Paris, she would have been the gayest of the gay.