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one to mourn for her. But she said nothing of that. The lonely old woman was on the brink of uselessness. What would happen when that time came? Who would care for her?
    ‘Be a wise girl and stick to service,’ Miss Gilchrist continued, ‘it’s a great safeguard against poverty.’
    Mary said, shyly:
    ‘There are some would say to go for a house and a husband.’
    ‘And hardship,’ Miss Gilchrist said. ‘They say nothing about the hardship. That’s what house and husband mean for people of our rearing and family. Take an old woman’s advice and don’t be led astray by a fancy.’
    Mary, thinking of Fitz, knew she would follow her fancy wherever it led. Whatever hardship might come it would be better than loneliness. It would be better to share cold and want than have food and fire in a house that must always be a stranger’s. She said nothing of that either. How could she?
    ‘When I was a child,’ said Miss Gilchrist, ‘I saw the famine. They ate the grass out of the ditches and the leaves off the trees and when I walked as a little girl down the length of a lane the corpses I saw had the green juice still on their lips. That’s what I remember as a child. That and the smell of the potato blight.’
    ‘I heard about it from my own people,’ Mary said.
    ‘And those that tried to raise the people out of poverty were hanged or sent off in chains to Australia.’
    Mary looked at the drawing on the mantelpiece, Miss Gilchrist’s Fenian; the handsome young rebel who had sheltered in her father’s house when she was a young girl. Miss Gilchrist followed her eyes.
    ‘That was one of them,’ she said gently, ‘the flower of them all.’
    It occurred to Mary that Miss Gilchrist may have loved him. Had she watched him slip out into the dark one night, watched the bonfires on the hills, heard of the miserable failure of yet another rebellion?
    ‘Stick to service,’ Miss Gilchrist repeated. ‘In this country the ones that don’t fight are not worth your attention and the ones that do bring nothing but heartbreak.’
    ‘You should go to bed now,’ Mary prompted. ‘The rest will do you all the good in the world.’
    Miss Gilchrist handed her the glass and rose with difficulty. ‘That’s what I’ll do,’ Miss Gilchrist agreed.
    Mary went to sleep with the sound of foghorns still vibrating at intervals through the room. It was past midnight. Outside the fog spread and deepened, curling around the well-kept houses of Kingstown, creeping along the deserted roads of Blackrock and Booterstown, stealing along the quays and the crowded slums of the city where rooms became damper and more evil-smelling and the great tide of destitute humanity settled down to the familiar joys and miseries of its lot; in the stink of terrible houses quarrelling, loving, sinning, sleeping, cohabiting, praying and dying. The fog rolled over all with ever-shifting movements, so that the city lay submerged and paralysed and the foghorns had it all to themselves. They sang all night to the great and the little, telling them life was vanity and Death the only certainty.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Mary had told Mrs. Bradshaw she had an aunt in the city for one reason only. There was no other way in which she could be free to visit Fitz. As a servant in training she was practically the property of the Bradshaws, dependent on their kindness for every occasional release from duty. She had no fixed day off and no agreed arrangement of work. To her parents, as to society, the condition was customary and therefore beyond questioning. She hated the deceit which, in the face of Mrs. Bradshaw’s gentleness and trust, made her feel unworthy. Yet what was she to do? She was one of a class without privilege and like most of the others she had found her own means to filch a little freedom from time to time. When it was discovered, as it had to be, she suffered in a way which puzzled and terrified her.
    Mrs. Bradshaw suffered too. She felt that Mary had justified