Susan, who has been inveigled into a promise concerning bull’s-eyes, is now led triumphantly into Miss Ricketty’s shop, where that spinster is discovered in an Old English attitude, her body being screwed out of all shape in her endeavour to catch sight of someone going down the street. Her window is quite blocked up by her shoulders, and her deafness prevents her from knowing of Susan’s coming until Jacky, falling over her left leg, which is sticking out behind in mid air, brings her back to the perpendicular and a view of Susan. She is a small woman, thin to a fault, and shrewd-visaged, with a quizzical eye and a bonnet. The latter is of the historic coal-scuttle shape, and must have been a most admirable purchase when bought—‘warranted to wear,’ in the truest sense of the word, as it has lasted without a break for at least fifty years. As no one in Curraghcloyne ever saw her ‘outside of it,’ and as she is popularly supposed to sleep in it, it may safely be regarded as a sound article; even her worst enemy had once been heard to say that, ‘no matther how great an ould fool she was wid her tongue,’ she had made no mistake about ‘the bonnet.’ ‘An’ is that you, Miss Susan, me dear?’ says she, when Jacky has picked himself up, and she has ceased to rub her ankle. ‘Ye’re as welcome as the flowers in May, though divil a flower we had this year, wid the rain an’ all. Ye’re not in a hurry, miss, are ye, now? Ye can spare a minute to the ould maid? Come in, then.’ She opens the little gate that hinges on to her little counter, and draws Susan inside, to her ‘parlour,’ as she calls the tiny space within—a cosy spot in truth, where in the winter a fire burns briskly, and with a wall lined with bottles that make glad the souls of children. To Susan Barry the old maid has given all the heart that remains from her worship of her giant brother. Perhaps it is the almost childish sweetness of her manner that has won the old maid’s heart, or else the young unconscious beauty of her—beauty being dear to the Irish heart. However it is, she has a warm corner in Miss Ricketty’s. ‘An’ how’s your good aunt?’ says the spinster, adjusting the bonnet with one hand, whilst with the other she pulls out from under the counter a huge ear-trumpet, half a yard long, and big enough at the speaking end to engulf Susan’s small and shapely head. ‘She’s been expectin’ that clutch o’ eggs I promised her, no doubt; but them hens o’ mine might as well be cocks for all the eggs we get out of them.’ ‘Aunt Jemima knows that eggs are scarce now,’ cries Susan, softly, into the gulf. ‘Scarce! ’Tis nothin’ them ungrateful hens is doin’ for us now, an’ we who coddled ’em up all the winther. The saints forgive thim! Miss Susan’—leaning towards the girl, and speaking with the suppressed emotion of the born gossip—‘was that Misther Wyndham as wint up the street just now?’ ‘Yes,’ says Susan. ‘I was talking to him just before I came in here.’