"Certainly, Mrs. Brannagan. O Lord, yes!"
He handed it across the counter.
"Such a quare letter? Oh, I hear the boss coming in across the yard." ... She had taken the empty glass from before Thomas James, and again was it filled.... Her husband stood before her. And this was the moment she had worked up to so well.
"I'll hand it back to you when he goes out," she whispered.
"All right, ma'am!"
Thomas James and Mr. Brannagan fell into a chat while she went towards the kitchen. She took the letter from her flat bosom, where she had hastily thrust it and looked at it from every possible angle. It seemed to possess a compelling attraction. But she could not open it here. She would run across to her friend the postmistress, who had every appliance for an operation of the kind. Besides she was the person who had first right to open it.... Soon the bespectacled maid and the barren woman were deep in examination of Rebecca Kerr's letter to Ulick Shannon. Into their minds was beginning to leap a terrible joy as they read the lines it had cost Rebecca immense torture to write.
"This is great, this is great!" said the ancient postmistress, clicking her tongue continually in satisfaction. "The cheek of her, mind you, not to send it by the public post like another. But I knew well there was something quare when I saw her calloguing with Thomas James at the market square."
"Wasn't she the sly, hateful, little thing. Why you'd never have thought it of her?"
"A grand person indeed to have in charge of little, innocent girls!"