s about," said
Michael, unhearing, unheeding. "Rare tales she would be telling me and I
no higher than the sill of the window there, and I'd thought to find her
long dead and buried surely, the way she was always as old as the Abbey
itself. But no--there she was still in her bit of a cottage, the time I
was just home, the oldest old woman I ever saw out of a mummy's wrappings
and like a witch indeed with the poor, pockmarked face she has."

The figure on the couch was relaxing more and more now, and the Irishman
sank his voice to a purling murmur of brogue.

Jane found a low chair and propped her elbow on the arm of it and leaned
her cheek on her hand and closed her eyes. She did not want to look at
young Randal and she found that she could not look at Michael Daragh. She
was glad to be in a corner of the little room where the faint light of
the lamp did not penetrate; she wished it might have been complete
darkness to cover her. She was so unutterably tired ... never in her life
had she been so tired. And Michael Daragh, her best friend of four good
years, her--what should she say?--dream lover? Yes, that was sufficiently
cheap and sentimental and maudlin for the sort of thing she had indulged
in,--her dream lover for two blissful months, seemed as much of a
stranger to her now, as strange and as unpleasantly distasteful as the
young artist and dope fiend on the sagging bed-couch.

When the boy fell asleep, she would creep away, and _away_!

CHAPTER XIX

Meanwhile, the Irishman's voice went steadily on.

"Well, I told her there were great tales going the world over about her
lace making and her getting famous and proud through the length of the
land and I mind well the cackle of a laugh she gave. 'The loveliest lace,
is it? Now, isn't that the great wonder surely? The wizenedy, wrinkled
old hag with the God-help-you face makes the loveliest lace--' Then she
stopped short off and clapped a claw over her mouth and the scar on her
pockmarked face was a pitiful thing to see.

"'The curse of the crows on my tongue,' she said. 'Is himself out there
in the sun the way he'd be hearing me? No? Glory be to God then, he's off
to the Crossroads, to be picking up a copper maybe and the people going
by to the Fair.'

"I asked her why she didn't want her husband to be hearing her make mock
of her face, and she said, 'Have you the hunger on you for a tale, still,
man grown that you are? W