and
sick and ailing they were half the time. The Sisters would come from the
convent to give me charity. 'Twas precious little they gave, and
lectured me too for not being more submiss'! And I didn't want their
charity; I wanted to get up in the world. I'd wanted that before I was
married, and now I wanted it for the children. Likely girls the two
eldest were, and the boy just beginning to go the way of his father.'

She came to a sudden stop and breathed hard; the strong old face was
still stretched out to the priest in her eagerness; the staff was
swaying to and fro beneath the tremulous hand. She had poured out her
words so quickly that there was in his chest a feeling of answering
breathlessness, yet he still sat regarding her placidly with the
serenity of healthy youth.

She did not give him long rest. 'What did I see around me?' she
demanded. 'I saw people that had begun life no better than myself
getting up and getting up, having a shop maybe, or sending their
children to the "Model" School to learn to be teachers, or getting them
into this business or that, and mine with never so much as knowing how
to read, for they hadn't the shoes to put on----

'And I had it in me to better them and myself. I knew I'd be strong if
it wasn't for the babies, and I knew, too, that I'd do a kinder thing
for each child I had, to strangle it at it's birth than to bring it on
to know nothing and be nothing but a poor wretched thing like Terry
O'Brien himself----'

At the word 'strangle' the young priest took his feet from the ledge in
front of the fire and changed his easy attitude, sitting up straight and
looking more serious.

'It's not that I blamed O'Brien over much, he'd just had the same sort
of bringing up himself and his father before him, and when he was sober
a very nice man he was; it was spiritiness he lacked; but if he'd had
more spiritiness he'd have been a wickeder man, for what is there to
give a man sense in a rearing like that? If he'd been a wickeder man I'd
have had more fear to do with him the thing I did. But he was just a
good sort of creature without sense enough to keep steady, or to know
what the children were wanting; not a notion he hadn't but that they'd
got all they needed, and I had it in me to better them. Will ye dare to
say that I hadn't?

'After Terry O'Brien went I had them all set out in the world, married
or put to work with the best, and they've got ahead. All but O'Brien's
eldest son