f the summer there would be lilies in the
garden, and in the autumn hollyhocks and sunflowers. There were a few
fruit-trees a little further on, and, lower down, a stream. A little
bridge led over the stream into the meadow, and Molly and her
grand-aunt used to go as far as the bridge, and everyone wondered what
the child and the old woman had to say to each other. Molly was never
able to give any clear account of what the old woman said to her during
the time they spent by the stream. She had tried once to give Molly an
account of one long winter when the lake was frozen from side to side.
Then there was something running in her mind about the transport of
pillars in front of the Big House--how they had been drawn across the
lake by oxen, and how one of the pillars was now lying at the bottom of
the lake. That was how Molly took up the story from her, but she
understood little of it. Molly's solicitude for the old woman was a
subject of admiration, and Molly did not like to take the credit for a
kindness and pity which she did not altogether feel. She had never seen
anyone dead, and her secret fear was that the old woman might die
before she went away to service. Her parents had promised to allow her
to go away when she was eighteen, and she lived in the hope that her
aunt would live two years longer, and that she would be saved the
terror of seeing a dead body. And it was in this intention that she
served her aunt, that she carefully minced the old woman's food and
insisted on her eating often, and that she darted from her place to
fetch the old woman her stick when she rose to go. When Margaret Kirwin
was not in the kitchen Molly was always laughing and talking, and her
father and mother often thought it was her voice that brought the old
woman out of her room. So the day Molly was grieving because she could
not go to the dance the old woman remained in her room, and not seeing
her at tea-time they began to be afraid, and Molly was asked to go
fetch her aunt.

"Something may have happened to her, mother. I daren't go."

And when old Margaret came into the kitchen towards evening she
surprised everyone by her question:--

"Why is Molly crying?"

No one else had heard Molly sob, if she had sobbed, but everyone knew
the reason of her grief; indeed, she had been reproved for it many
times that day.

"I will not hear any more about it," said Mrs. O'Dwyer; "she has been
very tiresome all day. Is it my fault if I cann