le that
they should look to them? One loves the bud because one expects the
flower. The sea-kale now was beyond their notice, and though they
plucked the crocuses, they did so with tears upon their cheeks.
After much consideration the church had been abandoned by all except
Aunt Letty and Herbert. That Lady Fitzgerald should go there was
impossible, and the girls were only too glad to be allowed to stay
with their mother. And the schools in which they had taught since the
first day in which teaching had been possible for them, had to be
abandoned with such true pangs of heartfelt sorrow.

From the time when their misery first came upon them, from the days
when it first began to be understood that the world had gone wrong at
Castle Richmond, this separation from the schools had commenced. The
work had been dropped for a while, but the dropping had in fact been
final, and there was nothing further to be done than the saddest of
all leavetaking. The girls had sent word to the children, perhaps
imprudently, that they would go down and say a word of adieu to their
pupils. The children had of course told their mothers, and when the
girls reached the two neat buildings which stood at the corner of the
park, there were there to meet them, not unnaturally, a concourse of
women and children.

In former prosperous days the people about Castle Richmond had, as
a rule, been better to do than their neighbours. Money wages had
been more plentiful, and there had been little or no subletting of
land; the children had been somewhat more neatly clothed, and the
women less haggard in their faces; but this difference was hardly
perceptible any longer. To them, the Miss Fitzgeralds, looking at
the poverty-stricken assemblage, it almost seemed as though the
misfortune of their house had brought down its immediate consequences
on all who had lived within their circle; but this was the work
of the famine. In those days one could rarely see any member of a
peasant's family bearing in his face a look of health. The yellow
meal was a useful food--the most useful, doubtless, which could at
that time be found; but it was not one that was gratifying either to
the eye or palate.

The girls had almost regretted their offer before they had left the
house. It would have been better, they said to themselves, to have
had the children up in the hall, and there to have spoken their
farewells, and made their little presents. The very entering those
schoo