“And what are you going to do, Nora?” I asked.

“Is it me, Miss Bawn?  Sure, I’ll stay where I am.  I’ve been in and out with them; and if I’m to get it, I’ll get it.  Ask some one to take the children away.  Then I’ll be able to help with the nursing.  Maybe ’tis what God meant for me.”

We stood and looked at each other across the space.  Why, it was what I had desired, that my face should be marred, so that Richard Dawson would turn away from me in disgust.  For a moment I had an impulse to cross the line she had set for me, to go as she had gone into infected places.  Perhaps she read the thought in my face, for she cried out to me to go away, to remember those who depended on me for happiness and go.  She wrung her hands when I did not go.

“Go away, for God’s sake,” she cried again, “and don’t have the face he cares about destroyed with the small-pox!  See now, Miss Bawn, darling, what would his Lordship and her Ladyship do without you?”

But while she coaxed me with their names I could see that she dreaded the small-pox for me lest my face should be spoilt for Richard Dawson, and I thought it one of the greatest things I had known in the heart of a woman.

CHAPTER XXX

THE DARK DAYS

I remember the weeks after that like a bad dream.  The small-pox had spread from Araglin to other villages and to the isolated cabins.  No one knew where it had come from, or where it would go next, for it spread like wildfire.  And the doctors and nurses had come down from Dublin in a cheerful little band and were fighting it heroically.  For some weeks there were only new outbreaks to tell of.  For some weeks there were panic and terror everywhere.

My lover wanted to marry me and carry me away out of the danger; but that I would not hear of.  It was enough that to please him I must shut myself away in a selfish isolation.  If I had been a free woman I would have insisted on going, as my godmother had gone, while yet the help was wanted.  During those weeks I was cut off from the comfort of her presence, for even when she was no longer needed she was in quarantine lest she should have taken the infection.

I will say that the Dawsons gave generously of their money for the aid of the people.

When we knew first of the outbreak and heard that Mary Champion was in the thick of it, my lover was moody and silent for a while even when he was with me.

I remember once that he kicked at a coal which had fallen from the fire and lay on the hearth, and he frowned heavily.

“I ought to have been there, Bawn,” he said, “and it isn’t that I was afraid.  Good Lord!  I should think not.  You would like me just as well with my beauty spoilt in such a cause.  But it is that you make a coward of me, little girl.  When I think that anything might happen now to prevent our marriage it makes me sweat with fear.  Else I would have risked my life over and over again, and not have cared two straws about it.”