"Can we take our things with us?" she asked.
"Take these!" he replied scornfully. "I've bought furniture, cows and horses, everything. What would we do with these?"
He was a man, and she a woman, whose heart was devoted to these old familiar, useful friends. A few of them she took with her, and placed in her own room at the new home, among them the old cane chair where her husband had sat, night after night, to smoke his pipe.
In the new home, Samuel Quirk soon found work and pleasure in supervising the employees. Of agriculture and horticulture he knew nothing, but he gathered knowledge speedily as he stood over his workers. He bore the transplanting well, and throve in the new soil, while Mrs. Quirk was lonely and sad. There were none of her old cronies with whom to discuss small gossip over the counter or in the back room behind the shop. She missed the noise of the great city; the house was so large that it frightened her. When Kathleen O'Connor came, the old woman put her arm lovingly around her and said:
"Sure you will be coming to stay, Honey?"
"I hope so," replied the girl.
"Now, don't be calling me Mrs. Quirk; just call me Granny, as all the girls did in Melbourne. It was: 'How are ye, Granny?' and 'How are the rheumatics, Granny?' I miss the bright girls now."
Kathleen realised that here was a lonely soul, and found all the expected strangeness in the new life vanish from her.
She set herself to the purpose of making Mrs. Quirk happy, devising a hundred means to accomplish this. In the house she interested the old lady in reading, with fancy work, and, above all, with the artistic arrangement of the rooms.
"There is no reason why things should not be pretty," she said. "Let us begin with your own room, and gradually transform the house. It is so ugly now."