’It’s not that I blamed O’Brien over much, he’d just had the same sort of bringing up himself and his father before him, and when he was sober a very nice man he was; it was spiritiness he lacked; but if he’d had more spiritiness he’d have been a wickeder man, for what is there to give a man sense in a rearing like that?  If he’d been a wickeder man I’d have had more fear to do with him the thing I did.  But he was just a good sort of creature without sense enough to keep steady, or to know what the children were wanting; not a notion he hadn’t but that they’d got all they needed, and I had it in me to better them.  Will ye dare to say that I hadn’t?

’After Terry O’Brien went I had them all set out in the world, married or put to work with the best, and they’ve got ahead.  All but O’Brien’s eldest son, every one of them have got ahead of things.  I couldn’t put the spirit into him as I could into the littler ones and into the girls.  Well, but he’s the only black sheep of the seven, for two of them died.  All that’s living but him are doing well, doing well’ (she nodded her head in triumph), ’and their children doing better than them, as ought to be.  Some of them ladies and gentlemen, real quality.  Oh! ye needn’t think I don’t know the difference’ (some thought expressed in his face had evidently made its way with speed to her brain)—­’my daughter that lives here is all well enough, and her girl handsome and able to make her way, but I tell you there’s some of my grandchildren that’s as much above her in the world as she is above poor Terry O’Brien—­young people that speak soft when they come to see their poor old grannie and read books, oh!  I know the difference; oh!  I know very well—­not but what my daughter here is well-to-do, and there’s not one of them all but has a respect for me.’  She nodded again triumphantly, and her eyes flashed.  ’They know, they know very well how I set them out in the world.  And they come back for advice to me, old as I am, and see that I want for nothing.  I’ve been a good mother to them, and a good mother makes good children and grandchildren too.’

There was another pause in which she breathed hard; the priest grasped the point of the story; he asked—­

‘What became of O’Brien?’

‘I drowned him.’

The priest stood up in a rigid and clerical attitude.

‘I tell ye I drowned him.’  She had changed her attitude to suit his; and with the supreme excitement of telling what she had never told, there seemed to come to her the power to sit erect.  Her eagerness was not that of self-vindication; it was the feverish exaltation with which old age glories over bygone achievement.

’I’d never have thought of it if it hadn’t been O’Brien himself that put it into my head.  But the children had a dog, ’twas little enough they had to play with, and the beast was useful in his way too, for he could mind the baby at times; but he took to ailing—­like enough it was from want of food, and I was for nursing him up a bit and bringing him round, but O’Brien said that he’d put him into the canal.  ’Twas one Sunday that he was at home sober—­for when he was drunk I could handle him so that he couldn’t do much harm.  So says I, “And why is he to be put in the canal?”