I lay staring into the dark. I could see that garret room, and the violin on the shelf, almost I could see Burton Raymond walking around, very cold and poor, perhaps; but so lovable, yes, so lovable, that poverty seemed the very highest distinction. I made up a long story about him all by myself. He had a great fortune left him, and grew into a lord again, and married Auntie May long before I went to sleep.
But there was another side to the picture.
"It's the cheek that himself has to be coming after our young lady," Norah declared. "A lad out of a butter and eggs shop! Is it fitting for the likes of him to lift his eyes to her?"
"Who, Norah?" I asked, breathlessly.
She was washing clothes with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. First her hands went down into the water with a rush, and then they came up again, and she rubbed something white on a board, amid a snowy froth of suds that was good to look upon. Norah was an authority on washing, and she was, also, an authority on love. Sometimes she would toss back the stray locks from her face, and sing as she scrubbed with a naïve abandon that would bring grandmother to the scene in a hurry:
"I'm jist siventeen,
And I've niver had a beau."
Norah sang at the top of her strong voice accenting each line with great enjoyment.
"Is there any gint will have me?
Ah, don't say no!"
The last phrase was coaxing in the extreme, and I might have been properly impressed if I had not known that Norah was quite old, twenty-five almost, and that down in the very bottom of her trunk there was the picture of a wild Irish lad whom she had loved and left in the old country. Sometimes I used to dream that he would come to America, too, and get rich notwithstanding his wildness, and find Norah out, and, just suppose, he might make a great lady out of her! Life was full of such glorious possibilities in those days!