“Yes, Mrs. Moloney, you must watch him carefully, and here I am if there is any change.  I’m sure that lady is an excellent nurse, and we mustn’t let any chance slip of keeping him alive, must we?”

She shook her head; this was only an English curate, still he must be obeyed.

Molly was profoundly irritated by Mrs. Moloney’s proceeding to make a cup of tea for the priest, but he was grateful for it, as he had been out at tea-time, and had come to the Moloneys’ instead of eating his dinner.  He opened the window of the tiny room as far as it would go, and read his Office by the light of the tallow candle.  That finished, he sat still and began to wonder about the lady with the olive complexion and the strange, grey eyes.

“I felt as if I should frizzle up in the fire of her wrath,” he thought with a smile.

He took his rosary and was half through it when the door opened and Molly came in.  She shut it noiselessly, and then spoke in her usual unmoved, impersonal voice.

“The new medicine is not having any effect; the temperature has gone up; the doctor said if it did so now it was a hopeless case.  I must rouse him in an hour to give him another dose and take the temperature again.  After that, if it is as high as I expect it to be, you can do anything you like to him.”

As she said the last words, she went back into the other room.

The hour passed slowly, and she came again and let the priest know in almost the same words that he was free to act as he pleased.  Then she added abruptly—­

“Do you mind telling me your name?”

“My name?  Molyneux.”

“Then are you any relation of Lord Groombridge?”

“I am his cousin.”

“I have been at Groombridge.”  But the priest felt that the tone was not in the least more friendly.

“Moloney won’t suffer now,” she went on, turning towards the door, “and I think he will be conscious for a time.”

Molly was giving up her self-imposed charge; she wanted to be off.  With the need for help no longer an attraction, Moloney had almost ceased to interest her; he would remain only as part of the darker background of her mind, as a dim figure among many in the dim coloured atmosphere of revolt and bitterness in which her thoughts on human life would move when she had no labour for her hands.  He was another of those who suffered so uselessly, a mere half animal who had to do the rough work of the world, and then was dropped into the great charnel house of unmeaning death.  As soon as the man began to show signs, faint signs of perception, she left the priest by his bedside and went back into the inner room to put on the cloak she had left there.  And then she hesitated.