"And how pretty and happy he looks! I wonder if he is happy—if he is anywhere?"
"Well, some time we shall know! And perhaps it is better for him as it is. Often and often his father and I were perplexed as to what we ought to do for him by and by. At any rate he's past our marring! And I hope we shall have no more children to deal with—be responsible for."
Ronayne says I ought to add what I have only told him under my breath, that it completes my sketch of this "advanced" woman, a mother despite herself.
On leaving I said to her something as to where the boy would be buried.
"It is not quite settled," she replied, "but Kensal Green, I suppose. We are both strong advocates of cremation, and wish so much that it were a present possibility. If it were, and even a difficult one, we should certainly bear our practical testimony to the more sanitary way of disposing of our dead. But——"
"Heaven help you!" I interrupted; "and farewell!"
We dare not tell this to nurse, who, though she was the little fellow's fast friend, cried out at the first news of his death:
"Oh, I am glad he is gone, the poor dear! But he was too good for them, and I'm glad he didn't live to have his heart quite broken."
And so ends my going forth after new lights. I'm the richer for my foray in two friends, and the certainty that, Bohemian as I am, I am but a fossil too, and that nature fitted me exactly to my place in making me only the contentedly obscure wife of an Irish member and your