t talk could not be proceeded with. Mary was enticed into a
game composed in part of pussy-four-corners and tip-an-tig, with a
general flavor of leap-frog working through. In five minutes her hair
and her stockings were both down, and the back of her skirt had crawled
three-quarters round to the front. The twins shouted and bumped on the
bed, upon which and on Mrs. Makebelieve they rubbed bread and butter
and sugar, while their mother roared an anecdote at Mrs. Makebelieve
in tones that ruled the din as a fog horn rules the waves.

XX

Mary had lavished the entire of her first day's wages on delicate
foods wherewith to tempt her mother's languid appetite, and when the
morning dawned she arose silently, lit the fire, wet the tea and
spread her purchases out on the side of the bed. There was a slice of
brawn, two pork sausages, two eggs, three rashers of bacon, a bun, a
pennyworth of sweets and a pig's foot. These, with bread, and butter,
and tea, made a collection amid which an invalid might browse with
some satisfaction. Mary then awakened her, and sat by in a dream of
happiness watching her mother's eye roll slowly and unbelievingly from
item to item. Mrs. Makebelieve tipped each article with her first
finger and put its right name on it unerringly. Then she picked out an
important looking sweet that had four colors and shone like the sun,
and put it in her mouth.

"I never saw anything like it, you good child you," said she.

Mary rocked herself to and fro and laughed loudly for delight, and
then they ate a bit of everything, and were very happy.

Mrs. Makebelieve said that she felt altogether better that morning.
She had slept like a top all through the night, and, moreover, had a
dream wherein she saw her brother Patrick standing on the remotest sea
point of distant America, from whence he had shouted loudly across the
ocean that he was coming back to Ireland soon, that he had succeeded
very well indeed, and that he was not married. He had not changed in
the slightest degree, said Mrs. Makebelieve, and he looked as young
and as jolly as when he was at home with her father and herself in the
County Meath twenty-two years before. This mollifying dream and the
easy sleep which followed it had completely restored her health and
spirits. Mrs. Makebelieve further intimated that she intended to go to
work that day. It did not fit in with her ideas of propriety that her
child should turn into a charwoman, the m