“’Twas not, sorr. ’Twas her due!” he retorted with vehemence. “Well, one night there was a terrible whirra loo--her ladyship had a baby unexpected! No doctor, nor nurse, nor clothes ready. Old ‘Betty the brag’ was called in, for the French maid was no good at all, only for screeching. Well, the baby was a girl, and a cruel disappointment, as a boy was wanted; however, av coorse she had to be reared all the same, and there was no means of feeding the crature, till Betty bethought her of Katty Foley. She had a young infant. Katty was about forty, a big, strong major of a woman. She’d been terribly unlucky, and had lost four children--some was born dead, some had just breath in them. People gave out it was a fairy blast. Howsomever, she had a living child at long last, four weeks old, and she took on the other poor little crawneen, and it throve elegantly. Well, when everything was going fair and aisy, her ladyship all of a sudden took and died. Just went out like a candle, and wid no more warning nor a snow-flake. And oh, but she made the beautiful corpse!” “Why, you did not see her, surely?” said Mr. Usher, in a key of startled protest. “No; but I heard tell the like was never beheld. Just the same as a dead angel! And I tell ye more: his lordship was all as wan as a mad man, and out of himself wid grief. The windows used to be open--it was summer--and I weeding and working hard by, and I heard him calling on her, and crying to her to come back--to come back. I declare to ye, sir, it was enough to melt the rock of Cashel; but sure, she was gone.” Here he gave a profound sigh. “They took her to England along with a great train of black mourners, and left the place just as it stood, and the child wid Katty. She had a bit of a farm and cows, and a nice decent slated house of her own; and his lordship would not so much as _look_ at the baby, and was terribly bitter against it. Bedad, there seemed a sort of blight on the family, for in about two months’ time the child pined off and died, and was packed in a grand little white coffin, and sent away to the family burying-ground, and laid alongside the mother.” “And so that was an end of the whole affair?”