“Little Katty is quite well again, Miss Bawn, and I’ve come to tell you, please Miss Bawn, that I’d rather not come back.  ’Tisn’t that I’m ungrateful, Miss.  No young lady could be kinder and better than you.  But my uncle is going to marry again, and if you please, Miss Bawn, I think I should like to go to America.”

“Don’t go to America, Nora,” I said; “it’s a terrible place.  I’ll look after you.  I’ll speak to Miss Champion, and we’ll see what we can do.  Miss Champion has so many friends.  She’ll easily get you another place, away from this, in Dublin.”

Suddenly the large tears filled Nora’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks.  She wept in rivers as a child does, and as painlessly.

“Don’t ask me to stay, Miss Bawn,” she said brokenly.  “I want to put the ocean between me and him.  I’ve done my best to pull him up out of my heart, and I’ve prayed my best, but I go on caring for him still.  I’d better be away, Miss Bawn.”

“Very well, Nora,” I said, in a miserable perplexity.  If she cared for Richard Dawson so much it was she who ought to marry him, peasant girl as she was.  It was a shame that I should step into her place, loathing it.  “Very well,” I said.  “I will do what I can to help you.  When do you go, Nora?”

“Not till after Christmas, Miss.  There won’t be any emigration till the worst of the winter storms are over.  Thank you kindly, Miss Bawn, but I don’t think there’s anything you can do for me.  The nuns’ll find me an employment while I stay.  You’re not vexed with me for leaving, Miss Bawn?”

“No, Nora, I quite understand,” I said.  And then on an impulse I kissed her.

I knew she was fond of me, almost as fond as my old dog; and she did not hate me, although I was going to marry the man she loved.  She flushed when I kissed her, and the tears came again to her eyes.

“You are very good to me, Miss Bawn,” she said.  “Not many ladies would be so good to a poor girl.  I hope you’ll be happy, Miss Bawn.  And I hope you’ll make him happy.  Don’t believe anything the people say about him.  He has a good heart, like his mother.  He’s been good to me.  Sure, if he wasn’t strong for the two of us, I’d have had no stren’th at all, though I promised you, Miss Bawn.  Many a day when I sat by little Katty, and the other children were at school and the place quiet I thought I’d have to run out of it to him.  Maybe I’d have done it too, only I knew it was no use, because you had his heart.”

She went a little way towards the door.  Then she came back again.

“I wouldn’t be goin’ too much to Araglin, Miss Bawn, if I was you,” she said.  “There’s a deal of sickness there.  You wouldn’t know what it might be going to be.”

Somehow this thought of hers for me touched me more than anything else.

“I’ll keep away, Nora,” I said, “unless it might be that I ought to go.  We weren’t afraid of the famine fever in the old times.  If there were to be such a thing again we might have to do what we did then.”