"Never mind, Myrrh," she said, as they reached the cottage door. "We'll do it somehow, you know, if we hold out long enough." And she seemed so sure that the boys felt surer too.
Nessa's voice within, speaking to Rose, emboldened them to lift the latch. The cottage was much like many another, but bare and neglected-looking. It felt cold, like an uninhabited place. A mud floor; at one end a cupboard; at the other a bed; a table, a couple of broken chairs; and in the smoke-stained fireplace a newly lit fire trying to burn; that was what the children saw. Rose, at the fire, was stirring something in a saucepan; Nessa was sitting beside the bed with her back turned to the door. There seemed at first to be no one else in the cottage except little Ellie, who was leaning against Nessa's knees; but as the children's eyes became used to the obscurity they distinguished on the pillow the white, wasted face of a sick woman.
Rosie looked up as they entered.
"There you are!" she exclaimed in a half-whisper. "Oh, it was such a good thing we came. Do you know she had nothing to eat, and there was no fire, and the door was open, and the pig had got in, and the chickens were pecking her oatmeal, and oh! everything was so miserably uncomfortable; but we've settled her bed, and now we're making some gruel."
Nessa looked round at the sound of their entry. Her face wore a saddened expression not usual to it.
"These are my little cousins," she said to Mrs. Daly; "but we did not know how ill you were when we agreed to come all together."
"They're very welcome, Ma'am," replied the poor woman, with a trace of cordial hospitality still left in her faint voice. "Ye're kindly welcome, my dears; will yez please to sit down?"
"Thank you," said Murtagh, and they sat down at once round the fire.
"Isn't there anything we can do?" whispered Murtagh, after a time.
"Oh, no," replied Rose. "We've done everything. We made the room tidy, and we lit the fire, and there was scarcely any wood, and she has hardly any covering on her bed, and there isn't a single thing to eat except a little oatmeal and some scraps of hard bread."