’Not that I ever was more than half sorry for the marriage myself, because of O’Brien’s children, poor things, that he had before I came to them.  Likely young ones they were too, and handsome, what would they have done if I hadn’t been there to put them out of the way when O’Brien was drunk, and knocking them round, or to put a bit of stuff together to keep them from nakedness?

’"Well,” said Father Maloney to me, “why isn’t it to O’Brien that you speak with your scolding tongue?” Faix! and what good was it to spake to O’Brien, I’d like to know?  Did you ever try to cut water with a knife, or to hurt a feather-bed by striking at it with your fist?  A nice good-natured man was Terry O’Brien—­I’ll never say that he wasn’t that,—­except when he was drunk, which was most of the time—­but he’d no more backbone to him than a worm.  That was the sort of husband Father Maloney married me to.

’The children kept a-coming till we’d nine of them, that’s with the five I found ready to hand; and the elder ones getting up and needing to be set out in the world, and what prospect was there for them?  What could I do for them?  Me always with an infant in my arms!  Yet ’twas me and no other that gave them the bit and sup they had, for I went out to work; but how could I save anything to fit decent clothes on them, and it wasn’t much work I could do, what with the babies always coming, and sick and ailing they were half the time.  The Sisters would come from the convent to give me charity.  ’Twas precious little they gave, and lectured me too for not being more submiss’!  And I didn’t want their charity; I wanted to get up in the world.  I’d wanted that before I was married, and now I wanted it for the children.  Likely girls the two eldest were, and the boy just beginning to go the way of his father.’

She came to a sudden stop and breathed hard; the strong old face was still stretched out to the priest in her eagerness; the staff was swaying to and fro beneath the tremulous hand.  She had poured out her words so quickly that there was in his chest a feeling of answering breathlessness, yet he still sat regarding her placidly with the serenity of healthy youth.

She did not give him long rest.  ‘What did I see around me?’ she demanded.  ’I saw people that had begun life no better than myself getting up and getting up, having a shop maybe, or sending their children to the “Model” School to learn to be teachers, or getting them into this business or that, and mine with never so much as knowing how to read, for they hadn’t the shoes to put on——­

’And I had it in me to better them and myself.  I knew I’d be strong if it wasn’t for the babies, and I knew, too, that I’d do a kinder thing for each child I had, to strangle it at it’s birth than to bring it on to know nothing and be nothing but a poor wretched thing like Terry O’Brien himself——­’

At the word ‘strangle’ the young priest took his feet from the ledge in front of the fire and changed his easy attitude, sitting up straight and looking more serious.