"I don't agree with you a bit—not a bit," says Mrs. Turner, rising abruptly. "I don't see the least likeness. She was pale and faded and worn like before she died, as why shouldn't she be, after all the troubles she'd gone through, and bearing six children, and all that, poor darling? And you, Miss Addie, are fresh and rosy and young, and all your troubles to come—"
"'Fresh and rosy and young,
And all my troubles to come!'"
laughs Addie, "Why, Sally, that's pretty! Are you aware of it?"
"The first bit of poetry I ever made in my life, Miss Addie, I give you my word. And now get up, like a dear young lady, and take a turn in the garden, and forget—forget—"
"Forget my mother died of decline before she was thirty! Yes, I will, Sally," she says, with a careless laugh. "I don't think of it often, I assure you."
"What makes you think of it at all?" asks the other sharply.
Addie, for answer, holds up her handkerchief, on which there is a bright red stain.
"That," cries Mrs. Turner, with a loud shrill laugh—"that? Musha, it's little need it takes to put it into your head! That? Why, before I was your age, Miss Addie, when I was a slip of a girl of eighteen, I was mortal bad in that way, and was never a bit the worse of it afterward; and my brother's child—I often told you about Kate McCarthy that married the miller's son—why, she was that bad with blood-spitting that all the doctors said she couldn't live a year; and now she's as strong and as healthy a woman as ye'd find in the County Westmeath, and the mother of twelve children, every one of them as strong as herself! That indeed!"
"'Fresh and rosy and young,
And all my troubles to come,'