"I know it's hard for you, Mrs. Kent, but it's harder for me to do it than it is for you to have it done," continued Mr. O'Shane, as he came out of the house with a rocking chair in his hands.
"O mercy! that is poor Jenny's chair!" almost screamed Mrs. Kent. "What have you done with her?"
The mother, in her agony, rushed into the house to ascertain if any harm had come to her suffering daughter, who had been deprived of the easy chair in which she was accustomed to sit. Fanny was moved to the depths of her nature—moved as she had never been moved before. She couldn't have believed that such scenes were real. She had read of them in romances, and even in the newspapers; but she had never realized that a man could be so hard as Mr. O'Shane, or that a woman could suffer so much as Mrs. Kent. Between her grief and indignation she was almost overwhelmed.
"You are a cruel man," said she, with something like fierceness in her tones.
"That's very foine for the likes of you to say to the likes of me; but it don't pay me rint," replied Mr. O'Shane, not as angry as might have been expected at this interference.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself to do such a mean thing!" added Fanny, her black eyes snapping with the living fire of her indignation.
"Shall I let me own childer starve for another man's childer?" answered the landlord, who, we must do him the justice to say, was ashamed of himself.
"How much does the woman owe you?" demanded Fanny.
"A matther of a hundred dollars—for a whole year's rint. Sure, miss, it isn't many min that would wait a twelvemonth for the rint, and not get it thin."
"And her daughter is sick?"