"We say it is good for you, too, Isabel, if she is not to hasten your death by preying on your nerves and causing you to break more blood vessels. So we are consulting your welfare as well as the girl's in sending her away."
My mother's timid soul could bear no more. I think it must have been the only moment of anger her gentle spirit ever knew, but, gathering all her strength, she turned upon Aunt Bridget in ungovernable excitement.
"Bridget," she said, "you are doing nothing of the kind. You know you are not. You are only trying to separate me from my child and my child from me. When you came to my house I thought you would be kinder to my child than a anybody else, but you have not been, you have been cruel to her, and shut your heart against her, and while I have been helpless here, and in bed, you have never shown her one moment of love and kindness. No, you have no feeling except for your own, and it never occurs to you that having brought your own child into my house you are trying to turn my child out of it."
"So that's how you look at it, is it?" said Aunt Bridget, with a flash of her cold grey eyes. "I thought I came to this house—your house as you call it—only out of the best intentions, just to spare you trouble when you were ill and unable, to attend to your duties as a wife. But because I correct your child when she is wilful and sly and wicked. . . ."
"Correct your own child, Bridget O'Neill!" cried my mother, "and leave mine to me. She's all I have and it isn't long I shall have her. You know quite well how much she has cost me, and that I haven't had a very happy married life, but instead of helping me with her father. . . ."
"Say no more," said Aunt Bridget, "we don't want you to hurt yourself again, and to allow this ill-conditioned child to be the cause of another hemorrhage."
"Bridget O'Neill," cried my mother, rising up from her chair, "you are a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition. You know as well as I do that it wasn't Mary who made me ill, but you—you, who reproached me and taunted me about my child until my heart itself had to bleed. For seven years you have been doing that, and now you are disposing of my darling over my head without consulting me. Has a mother no rights in her own child—the child she has suffered for, and loved and lived for—that other people who care nothing for it should take it away from her and send it into a foreign country where she may never see it again? But you shall not do that! No, you shall not'! As long as there's breath in my body you shall not do it, and if you attempt. . . ."
In her wild excitement my mother had lifted one of her trembling hands into Aunt Bridget's face while the other was still clasped about me, when suddenly, with a look of fear on her face, she stopped speaking. She had heard a heavy step on the stairs. It was my father. He entered the room with his knotty forehead more compressed than usual and said:
"What's this she shall not do?"
My mother dropped back into her seat in silence, and Aunt Bridget, wiping' her eyes on her black apron—she only wept when my father was present—proceeded to explain.