He was not unaccustomed to meeting perverts; it was impossible to have any strong emotion about so frequent an occurrence.  He had had a long walk and the hot air of the room made him somewhat sleepy; if it had not been for the fever and excitement of her mind he might not have picked up more than the main facts of all she said.  As it was, his attention wandered for some minutes from the words that came from her palsied lips.  It did not wander from her; he was thinking who she might be, and whether she was really about to die or not, and whether he had not better ask Father M’Leod to come and see her himself.  This last thought indicated that she impressed him as a person of more importance and interest than had been supposed when he had been sent to hear her confession.

All this time, fired by a resolution to tell a tale for the first and last time, the old woman, steadying as much as she might her shaking head, and leaning forward to look at the priest with bleared yet flashing eyes, was pouring out words whose articulation was often indistinct.  Her hand upon her staff was constantly moving, as if she were about to rise and walk; her body seemed about to spring forward with the impulse of her thoughts, the very folds of the scarlet bedgown were instinct with excitement.

The priest’s attention returned to her words.

’Yes, marry and marry and marry—­that’s what you priests in my young days were for ever preaching to us poor folk.  It was our duty to multiply and fill the new land with good Cath’lics.  Father Maloney, that was his doctrine, and me a young girl just come out from the old country with my parents, and six children younger than me.  Hadn’t I had enough of young children to nurse, and me wanting to begin life in a new place respectable, and get up a bit in the world?  Oh, yes! but Father Maloney he was on the look-out for a wife for Terry O’Brien.  He was a widow man with five little helpless things, and drunk most of the time was Terry, and with no spirit in him to do better.  Oh! but what did that matter to Father Maloney when it was the good of the Church he was looking for, wanting O’Brien’s family looked after?  O’Brien was a good, kind fellow, so Father Maloney said, and you’ll never hear me say a word against that.  So Father Maloney got round my mother and my father and me, and married me to O’Brien, and the first year I had a baby, and the second year I had another, so on and so on, and there’s not a soul in this world can say but that I did well by the five that were in the house when I came to it.

’Oh! “house"!——­ d’ye think it was one house he kept over our heads?  No, but we moved from one room to another, not paying the rent.  Well, and what sort of a training could the children get?  Father Maloney he talked fine about bringing them up for the Church.  Did he come in and wash them when I was a-bed?  Did he put clothes on their backs?  No, and fine and angry he was when I told him that that was what he ought to have done!  Oh! but Father Maloney and I went at it up and down many a day, for when I was wore out with the anger inside me, I’d go and tell him what I thought of the marriage he’d made, and in a passion he’d get at a poor thing like me teaching him duty.