say it is good for you, too, Isabel, if she is not to hasten your
death by preying on your nerves and causing you to break more blood
vessels. So we are consulting your welfare as well as the girl's in
sending her away."

My mother's timid soul could bear no more. I think it must have been the
only moment of anger her gentle spirit ever knew, but, gathering all her
strength, she turned upon Aunt Bridget in ungovernable excitement.

"Bridget," she said, "you are doing nothing of the kind. You know you
are not. You are only trying to separate me from my child and my child
from me. When you came to my house I thought you would be kinder to my
child than a anybody else, but you have not been, you have been cruel to
her, and shut your heart against her, and while I have been helpless
here, and in bed, you have never shown her one moment of love and
kindness. No, you have no feeling except for your own, and it never
occurs to you that having brought your own child into my house you are
trying to turn my child out of it."

"So that's how you look at it, is it?" said Aunt Bridget, with a flash
of her cold grey eyes. "I thought I came to this house--your house as
you call it--only out of the best intentions, just to spare you trouble
when you were ill and unable, to attend to your duties as a wife. But
because I correct your child when she is wilful and sly and
wicked. . . ."

"Correct your own child, Bridget O'Neill!" cried my mother, "and leave
mine to me. She's all I have and it isn't long I shall have her. You
know quite well how much she has cost me, and that I haven't had a very
happy married life, but instead of helping me with her father. . . ."

"Say no more," said Aunt Bridget, "we don't want you to hurt yourself
again, and to allow this ill-conditioned child to be the cause of
another hemorrhage."

"Bridget O'Neill," cried my mother, rising up from her chair, "you are a
hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition. You know as well as I do that
it wasn't Mary who made me ill, but you--you, who reproached me and
taunted me about my child until my heart itself had to bleed. For seven
years you have been doing that, and now you are disposing of my darling
over my head without consulting me. Has a mother no rights in her own
child--the child she has suffered for, and loved and lived for--that
other people who care nothing for it should take it away from her and
send it into a foreign country where she may never see it