“If her grandfather consents, Mary.  I have no doubt that he will consent if you ask him.  But Bawn will need some clothes if she is to see your friends.  What are we going to do about her clothes?”

“You must leave that to me, Lady St. Leger, as being Bawn’s godmother.  If I have not done my duty by her hitherto, it does not mean that I never shall.”

After all, I did not hear Uncle Luke’s story from my godmother but from Maureen Kelly.

Maureen was now getting old, and she had a room allotted to herself at the extreme end of the left wing which looked out on the gable of the Abbey and the graves which are all that remain of the old Abbey from which the house takes its name.

To be sure the grass grows up to the empty window-sockets of the gable; and as for the graves they are clean blotted out in the prairie grass that is like the grey waves of the sea above them.

It is a narrow slip of a room, and she sits there and sews, mending the linen which is old and thin and darning finely the holes in the damask cloth or the rents which time has made in my grandmother’s lace; and when the light fails her knitting those stockings of fine blue-grey wool which my grandfather always wears.

Maureen, as often happens with old privileged servants, quarrels with the other servants and is not much sought after by them.  She lives in a great independence of her own, and has her own cups and saucers; they are fine old china, with brown sea-shells and seaweed upon them, and they belonged to the nursery when I was the one child there.

And she has her own tea and bread and butter and sugar; and anything else she requires she fetches from the kitchen, walking about haughtily among the other servants, and not staying longer than is necessary to get what things she requires.

I went very often to Maureen’s room.

For one thing, it was like looking into my childhood to go there.  It is so still.  The nursery pictures are on the wall, and in a cupboard there are my discarded books and toys, with others of an earlier date than mine.  There is the dolls’ house which was given to my great-grandmother when she was a child by Lord Kilwarden, that just judge who was a great friend of our family.  It is not so elaborate as the dolls’ houses of to-day, but it is big enough for a small child to creep within it, and it seemed wonderful to me as it had done to my mother before me, and to my Aunt Eleanor, who was Theobald’s mother.  I know my grandmother loves the dolls’ house, and would not consent to its being put away in the lumber-room.

In winter Maureen’s room is the warmest spot of the house, which is old and draughty, and I have always gone there when I have wanted to get the chill out of my bones.  Maureen will sit by the window sewing, while I get down on to the little stool which used to be mine in my childhood and look into the heart of the flame and imagine things there.