ople than they now were,
but the master never spoke to them without remembering it, for though
they only thought of themselves as small farmers, dependents on the
squire, every one of them, boys and girls alike, retained an air of
high birth, which at the first glance distinguished them from the other
tenants of the estate. Though they were not aware of it, some sense of
their remote origin must have survived in them, and I think that in a
still more obscure way some sense of it survived in the country side,
for the villagers did not think worse of the O'Dwyers because they kept
themselves aloof from the pleasures of the village and its squabbles.
The O'Dwyers kept themselves apart from their fellows without any show
of pride, without wounding anyone's feelings.

The head of the family was a man of forty, and he was the trusted
servant, almost the friend, of the young master, he was his bailiff and
his steward, and he lived in a pretty cottage by the edge of the lake.
O'Dwyer's aunts, they were old women, of sixty-eight and seventy, lived
in the Big House, the elder had been cook, and the younger housemaid,
and both were now past their work, and they lived full of gratitude to
the young master, to whom they thought they owed a great deal. He
believed the debt to be all on his side, and when he was away he often
thought of them, and when he returned home he went to greet them as he
might go to the members of his own family. The family of the O'Dwyer's
was long lived, and Betty and Mary had a sister far older than
themselves, Margaret Kirwin, "Granny Kirwin," as she was called, and
she lived in the cottage by the lake with her nephew, Alec O'Dwyer. She
was over eighty, it was said that she was nearly ninety, but her age
was not known exactly. Mary O'Dwyer said that Margaret was nearly
twenty years older than she, but neither Betty nor Mary remembered the
exact date of their sister's birth. They did not know much about her,
for though she was their sister, she was almost a stranger to them. She
had married when she was sixteen, and had gone away to another part of
the country, and they had hardly heard of her for thirty years. It was
said that she had been a very pretty girl, and that many men had been
in love with her, and it was known for certain that she had gone away
with the son of the game keeper of the grandfather of the present Mr.
Roche, so you can understand what a very long while ago it was, and how
little of th