Nannie had leaned her head against the sofa-pillow and seemed about to fall asleep.

“There’s poor Nannie,” said Eliza, looking at her, “she’s wore out.  All the work we had, she and me, getting in the woman to wash him and then laying him out and then the coffin and then arranging about the Mass in the chapel.  Only for Father O’Rourke I don’t know what we’d done at all.  It was him brought us all them flowers and them two candlesticks out of the chapel and wrote out the notice for the Freeman’s General and took charge of all the papers for the cemetery and poor James’s insurance.”

“Wasn’t that good of him?” said my aunt

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“Ah, there’s no friends like the old friends,” she said, “when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust.”

“Indeed, that’s true,” said my aunt.  “And I’m sure now that he’s gone to his eternal reward he won’t forget you and all your kindness to him.”

“Ah, poor James!” said Eliza.  “He was no great trouble to us.  You wouldn’t hear him in the house any more than now.  Still, I know he’s gone and all to that....”

“It’s when it’s all over that you’ll miss him,” said my aunt.

“I know that,” said Eliza.  “I won’t be bringing him in his cup of beef-tea any me, nor you, ma’am, sending him his snuff.  Ah, poor James!”

She stopped, as if she were communing with the past and then said shrewdly: 

“Mind you, I noticed there was something queer coming over him latterly.  Whenever I’d bring in his soup to him there I’d find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open.”

She laid a finger against her nose and frowned:  then she continued: 

“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him.  If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap—­he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening.  He had his mind set on that....  Poor James!”

“The Lord have mercy on his soul!” said my aunt.

Eliza took out her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with it.  Then she put it back again in her pocket and gazed into the empty grate for some time without speaking.

“He was too scrupulous always,” she said.  “The duties of the priesthood was too much for him.  And then his life was, you might say, crossed.”

“Yes,” said my aunt.  “He was a disappointed man.  You could see that.”

A silence took possession of the little room and, under cover of it, I approached the table and tasted my sherry and then returned quietly to my chair in the comer.  Eliza seemed to have fallen into a deep revery.  We waited respectfully for her to break the silence:  and after a long pause she said slowly: