"My life! my life!" cried old Grannie passionately. "And tell me, acushla, what is the value of my life to me, if all that made it pleasant to my heart is to be taken from me? Haven't I seen your father, whom I nursed at this breast until (God pardon me!) I loved him as well or better than them that were sent to me for my own portion? haven't I seen him brought back here for a bloody burial in the very flower of his days? and didn't I lead the keening over him at the self-same moment that I knew my own poor boy was laying stiff and stark on the battle-field, where he had fallen (as well became him) in the defence of his own master? And now you come and tell me that you--you who are all that is left me in the wide world; you who have been the very pulse of my heart ever since you were in the cradle--that you and the old lord are to be driven out of your own kingdom, and sent, God only knows where, into banishment--(him an old man of seventy, and you a slip of a girl that was only yesterday, so to speak, in your nurse's arms)--and you would have me keep quiet, would you? You'd have me belie the thought of my heart with a smiling face? and all for the sake of a little longer life, forsooth! Troth, a-lannah, I have had a good taste of that same life already, and it's not so sweet I found it, that I would go as far as the river to fetch another sup of it. Not so sweet--not so sweet," moaned the old woman, rocking herself backward and forward in time to the inflection of her voice, "not so sweet for the lone widow woman, with barely a roof above her head, and not a chick or child (when you are out of it) for comfort or for coaxing!" Grannie had poured forth this harangue with all the eloquent volubility of her Irish heart and tongue, and though Nellie had made more than one effort for the purpose, she had hitherto found it quite impossible to check her. Want of breath, however, silenced her at last, and then her foster-child took advantage of the lull in the storm to say: "Dear old Grannie, do not talk so sadly. I will love and think of you every day, even in that far-off west to which we are exiled. And I forgot to say, moreover, that my dear mother is to remain here for some months longer, and will be ready (as she ever is) to give help and comfort to all that need it, and to you, of course, dear Grannie, more than to all the rest--you whom she looks, upon almost as the mother of her dead husband." "Ready to give help? Ay, that in troth she is," quoth Grannie, "God bless her for a sweet and gentle soul, that never did aught but what was good and kind to any one ever since she came among us, and that will be eighteen years come Christmas twelvemonth. Ochone! but them were merry times, a-lannah! long before you were born or thought of. {86} God pity you that you have burst into blossom in such weary days as these are!"