ad no confidence), while she
talked to the woman of the house, and heard the story of her trouble.

Her husband had been "above in the hospital at Riverstown. He was in
it with a fortnight," said the red-haired woman in the idiom of her
district, the noise of the rocker of the cradle on the earthen floor
beating through her words; "he had a bunch, like, undher his chin, and
they were to cut it." She paused, and the wooden bump of the cradle
filled the pause.

"When they had it cut, he rose up on the table, and all his blood went
from him; only one little tint, I suppose, stopped in him. Afther a
while, the nurse seen the life creeping back in him. 'We have him
yet!' says she to the Docthor. 'I thought he was gone from us!' says
the Docthor." The voice ceased again. The speaker slashed the frock in
her hand at an over-bold hen, who had skipped on to the table beside
her and was pecking hard and sharp at some food on a plate.

"They sent him home then. We thought he was cured entirely. He pulled
out the summer, but he had that langersome way with him through all."

She was silent a moment, then she looked at Christian, with grief,
crowned and omnipotent, on her tragic brow.

"As long as he was alive, I had courage in spite of all, but when I
thinks now of them days, and the courage I had, it goes through me!"
Her red-brown eyes stared through the open door at the path twisting
across the field to the high road.

"Ye'll never see him on that road again, and when I looks up it me
heart gets dark. Sure, now when he's gone, I thinks often, if he'd be
lyin' par'lysed above in the bed, I'd be runnin' about happy!"

When Christian went home Mrs. Barry walked with her to the little
green bridge, and stood there until her visitor reached the bend of
the river where the path passed from her sight.

At the turning Christian looked back and saw the lonely figure
standing at the bridge-head, and again she said to herself: "Here am
I, angry and whimpering!"

CHAPTER XXXVI

Doctor Mangan told himself that he had never laid out a ten-pound note
to better advantage than the one he had pushed into the heel of
Tishy's fist. It had, as he thought it would, clinched the matter. He
had never been unaware of the menace of Cloherty, R.A.M.C., but he was
confident in the three forces that he had at his command--authority,
bribery, and propinquity.

"If I know my young lady," he said cheerfully to himself, "she'll
think more