“She has a beautiful voice,” I answered her once, “and there is such assurance in her tread.  I should think it would be more trying to the nerves to live where every one went tiptoe.”

But no manner of coldness could check Miss Joan’s propensity for belittling her benefactress.  And I remember that once she had been tittle-tattling as usual, and had said something more indefensible than usual of her benefactress, when looking up suddenly we found Miss Champion in the room.

“Let the child love me, Joan,” she said, with the nearest approach to sharpness I ever heard in her speech; but when Miss Joan burst into tears she stooped and shook up her pillows and soothed her in a way that was tender without being attached, and afterwards she said something to me which was a dark saying since I did not know the secret between her and Miss Joan.

“One must needs be good to anything that has hurt one so much,” she said.

I had always known vaguely that there was something between Mary Champion and my Uncle Luke, and that explained to some extent her influence with my grandparents.  She brought into their shut-up lives, indeed, the open air and the ways of other folk, without which I think we should have all grown too strange and odd and a century at least behind our time.  Indeed, even with her, I think we were so much out of date.

“The child grows more and more like a plant which has lived without the light,” she said one day of me to my grandmother.

“It is Bawn’s nature to look pale,” my grandmother said, looking at me in an alarmed way.

“It is her nature to look pale perhaps,” my godmother said, while I fidgeted at hearing myself discussed, “but she ought to look no paler than this apple-blossom I am wearing, which at all events dreams of rose-colour.  You keep her too much penned.  I shall have to carry her off to Dublin for some gaiety.  If the season were not nearly over——­”

“We couldn’t do without Bawn,” said my grandmother hastily.  “We are too old to live without something young beside us.  Besides, she is very happy—­aren’t you, Bawn?”

“Very happy.”  I answered the appeal in her dear voice and eyes.  And to be sure I was happy, if it were not for the loneliness and the ghosts at night.

“She is always reading,” my godmother went on.  “Young girls should not be always reading.  It bends their backs and dims their eyes and makes them forget their walks and rides.  I’ll tell you what, Lady St. Leger, you had better let Bawn come and learn butter-making with me at the Creamery.  I am going to take a course of lessons and then I can make my own butter.  I think Margaret Dwyer is getting past her work.  Joan says the butter is rancid, and for once I believe Joan has cause.  Every lady ought to at least superintend her own dairy.”

“I used to visit mine often,” said my grandmother, “before Lord St. Leger needed so much of my time.  It was a pretty place, with white walls and a fountain bubbling.  It is a long time since I have visited it.”