At sight of her young mistress standing in the doorway, bright-eyed and flushed, and strangely unlike herself, the good woman pauses.
"An' is it yourself, alanna? Shure my eyes have been aching for the sight of your face this hour or more! But what ails ye, Miss Honor darlint? Shure my black drames—bad 'cess to me for naming them till ye—have not been troubling your mind?"
"No, no!" the girl says, laughing. "I am not troubled about anything, only hot and thirsty, and—yes, Aileen, I may as well own it—cross."
She laughs again, but her voice is tremulous, and she keeps her face well turned from the light.
"I wish it was only cross that I was, darlint!" the old woman says with the peculiar solemnity of her class. "But it's sore and heavy-hearted I am, and that's the blessed truth. I've done nothing but drame since ever I saw you last, and every night it's the same thing over and over again, till my brain is almost turned wid it, and I rise up in the morning all in a cold perspoiration."
"Dear old Aileen," the girl says tenderly, "poor Rooney's awful death has upset you? It has upset us all for that matter! And then it must be so dreadful for you alone on that great bleak bog."
"Miss Honor, do ye mind my drame?"
"Every word of it, Aileen."
"Ye mind how I dramed that the boys dug the grave out on the moss, and hid it out of sight wid green branches!"
"I do surely."