Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared, unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin trembled--like a child's. And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her, she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her small savings in her greasy purse--clasped tightly in her two hands under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table--the visible symbol of her ruined home--with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could live with any longer, shouting, "_Your_ house, is it? I'll show yeh whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been "Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors. The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before--years before--in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The past--despite its poverty and starvation--had been as dear as life. She had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them; for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection. She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of regret, though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled with pity of herself in the determination.