it one for idleness. Even now--would you believe
it, ma'am?--I have a sort of longing to finger the oats and peas again.'

'But you are very fond of your cottage and your garden, Mr. O'Brien.
Captain Burnett says it is the prettiest little place about here.'

'Ah, I have been forgetting my manners, and I have never asked after the
Captain, though he is a prime favourite of mine. Oh yes, he always has
his little joke. "What will you sell it for, O'Brien, just as it stands?
Name your own price." Well, it is a snug little place; and if only my
little woman were here and I had news of Mat----' And here Mr. O'Brien
pushed his hand through his gray hair again, and sighed as he looked out
on his row of lilies.

Audrey sat still in sympathising silence. She knew how her old friend
loved to unburden himself. He talked to no one else as he did to this
girl--not even to the Captain. He liked to enlarge in his simple way on
his old happy life, when Prissy was young and he and his wife thought
handsome Joe Baxter a grand lover for their girl, with his fine figure
and soft, wheedling tongue.

'But we were old enough to know better--we were a couple of fools, of
course; I know that now,' he would say. 'But he just talked us over--Joe
is a rare hand at talking even now. He can use fine words; he has
learnt it in his business. I think our worst time was when Prissy's baby
died and she began to droop, and in her weakness she let it all out to
her mother. I remember my little woman coming into the shop that day,
with the tears running down her face. "Tom," she says, "what have we
ever done to be so punished? Joe is treating Prissy like a brute, and my
poor girl's heart is broken." Dear, dear! how I wanted Mat then!'

Audrey knew all about this Mat--at least, the little there was to know.
One day, soon after Mr. O'Brien had lost his wife, and she had found him
sitting alone in the porch, he had begun talking to her of his own
accord of a young brother whom he called Mat, but to no one else had he
ever mentioned his name. Audrey had been much touched and surprised by
this confidence, and from time to time Mr. O'Brien had continued to
speak of him, until she was in possession of the main facts.

Thomas O'Brien had lost his parents early, and his brothers and sisters
had died in infancy, with the exception of the youngest, Matthew, or
Mat, as he was generally called. There was so much difference between
their ages that Mat was quite a pl