My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.
The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by which the eldest boy was called.
Eily's face was just the same wild-flower, a little faded and drawn, and "Ah, sure!" was still on the tip of her tongue in all the beguiling glamour of Erin. But what a sad change! Tears looked fatally near the surface, and the smile was deprecating and anxious.
She had fallen from petted servitude into troubled servitude, and longed for the clatter of her aunt's household keys among the linen and china and preserve-presses of the storeroom. She longed for my stepfather's cheery "Well, Eily, little puss," and instead had to listen to an exacting husband's complaints of her deficiencies as housekeeper and sick-nurse. He had married a bird, and grumbled incessantly because it lacked the solid capacities of a cow.
"And your aunt, Eily?" I asked.
"Poor aunt died long ago. She never recovered the death of her only child, Frank, who was drowned going out to America."
So the young man in the brooch was Mrs. Clement's son, after all, and her melancholy, that had so puzzled my childhood, was not the gloom of remorse but the stamp of a common bereavement.
By the side of my grandfather's avenue of rose-trees ran a neighbour's garden. My grandfather was on nodding terms with his neighbour; but there sometimes came a bright-faced lad with a flaxen down upon his upper lip. His name caught my fancy, and I thought a fairy prince could not have a finer one. It now represents to the world a figure so very different from the vague but pleasant profile memory likes to dwell upon, that I permit myself to doubt if that kind boy and the O'Donovan Rossa of New York can be the same person.
The stripling I recall seems to me to have been eternally singing or whistling. I specially remember one song he was fond of—"Love among the Roses."