“Poor old Mrs. Bolan has gone to the better land. She and Bess will have a Christmas with the angels. They will not want to come back here.”
Dil had no courage to argue. But she knew to the very farthest fibre of her being, that nothing could so change Bess that she would desire to stay anywhere without her.
Mrs. Garrick had heard the tidings before she came in for her baby, and was profuse in her sympathies.
“But it’s the Lord’s mercy, for she were a poor sufferer, and was jist waitin’. How did it happen? Was it in the night, whilst ye were all asleep? An’ to think yer poor mother whint away knowin’ nothin’.”
“I can’t talk about it. I—I don’t know.”
“An’ old Mis’ Bolan. Well, I’ll run up-stairs a bit, an’ see Mrs. Murphy.”
She was rewarded for her trouble here; the strange curiosity of some, as if the dead face could answer the mystery.
“She’s a moighty quare girl, that Dilsey Quinn. Niver to be askin’ one to look at the corpse; an’ if Bess hadn’t been so peaked, she would have been a pritty child. She had such iligant hair.”
The neighbors began to make calls of condolence. Two deaths in a house was an event rather out of the common order of things.
Dil awed them by her quiet demeanor, and answered apathetically, busying herself with the supper.