was tender without being attached, and afterwards she said something to
me which was a dark saying since I did not know the secret between her
and Miss Joan.

"One must needs be good to anything that has hurt one so much," she
said.

I had always known vaguely that there was something between Mary
Champion and my Uncle Luke, and that explained to some extent her
influence with my grandparents. She brought into their shut-up lives,
indeed, the open air and the ways of other folk, without which I think
we should have all grown too strange and odd and a century at least
behind our time. Indeed, even with her, I think we were so much out of
date.

"The child grows more and more like a plant which has lived without the
light," she said one day of me to my grandmother.

"It is Bawn's nature to look pale," my grandmother said, looking at me
in an alarmed way.

"It is her nature to look pale perhaps," my godmother said, while I
fidgeted at hearing myself discussed, "but she ought to look no paler
than this apple-blossom I am wearing, which at all events dreams of
rose-colour. You keep her too much penned. I shall have to carry her
off to Dublin for some gaiety. If the season were not nearly over----"

"We couldn't do without Bawn," said my grandmother hastily. "We are too
old to live without something young beside us. Besides, she is very
happy--aren't you, Bawn?"