"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.

It seems I am a hard-hearted woman with a bad disposition and though,
I've been up early and late and made myself a servant for seven years
I'm only in this house to turn my sister's child out of it. It seems
too, that we have no business--none of us have--to say what ought to be
done for this girl--her mother being the only person who has any rights