e story of her life had come to the knowledge of those
living now.

It was certainly sixty years since she had gone away with this young
man; she had lived with him in Meath for some years, nobody knew
exactly how many years, maybe some nine or ten years, and then he had
died suddenly, and his death, it appears, had taken away from her some
part of her reason. It was known for certain that she left Meath after
his death, and had remained away many years. She had returned to Meath
about twenty years ago, though not to the place she had lived in
before. Some said she had experienced misfortunes so great that they
had unsettled her mind. She herself had forgotten her story, and one
day news had come to Galway--news, but it was sad news, that she was
living in some very poor cottage on the edge of Navan town, where her
strange behaviour and her strange life had made a scandal of her. The
priest had to inquire out her relations, and it took him some time to
do this, for the old woman's answers were incoherent, but he at length
discovered she came from Galway, and he had written to the O'Dwyers.
And immediately on receiving the priest's letter, Alec sent his wife to
Navan, and she had come back with the old woman.

"And it was time indeed that I went to fetch her," she said. "The boys
in the town used to make game of her, and follow her, and throw things
at her, and they nearly lost the poor thing the little reason that was
left to her. The rain was coming in through the thatch, there was
hardly a dry place in the cabin, and she had nothing to eat but a few
scraps that the neighbours gave her. Latterly she had forgotten how to
make a fire, and she ate the potatoes the neighbours gave her raw, and
on her back there were only a few dirty rags. She had no care for
anything except for her wedding-gown. She kept that in a box covered
over with paper so that no damp should get to it, and she was always
folding it and seeing that the moth did not touch it, and she was
talking of it when I came in at the door. She thought that I had come
to steal it from her. The neighbours told me that that was the way she
always was, thinking that someone had come to steal her wedding-gown."

This was all the news of Margaret Kirwin that Alec O'Dwyer's wife
brought back with her. The old woman was given a room in the cottage,
and though with food and warmth and kind treatment she became a little
less bewildered, a little less like a wild, hunted