sparkled at the last clause of his sentence, while he took out of his pocket a small parcel, and began to strip off its wrappages, which were many folds of bluish tissue-paper, with layers of grey-green dried grass between. “The man I got it from at Marseilles,” he said, “told me a lot of them came from Smyrna, and I never stirred these papers that were on it, thinkin’ I mightn’t be able to do it up so well again. I only hope it’s not broke on us.” As the thin sheets and light grass-wisps fell off, the blast whistling under the door-still whisked them about the uneven floor, and Mrs. Martin drew in her breath expectantly. At last the treasure was discovered in perfect preservation, an alabaster statuette of the Virgin, some two fingers high.

I do not know that it was a very fine work of art, but at worst you cannot easily make anything ugly out of alabaster. The Child lay placidly asleep, and the Mother looked young and happy and benignant. For a few moments Mrs. Martin’s admiration was quite incoherent, and when she found words Father Gilmore sought to stem the tide of ecstatic gratitude by saying, “And where will you put it? Why, here’s a niche looks as if it might have been made for it.” The place he pointed to was a little recess beneath a tiny window-slit, formed partly by design, but enlarged by the chance falling out of a fragment from the stone-and-mud wall. A long ray, slanted from the clearing west, reached through the half-door, quivered across the dark room, and just touched the white figure as he set it down. Against the background of grimy wall it shone as if wrought of rosed snow.

“Bedad, then, it’s there I’ll keep her, and nowhere else,” said the little old woman, and he left her in rapt contemplation. As he trudged home he felt sure that his few francs had been well bestowed, and his conviction strengthened with each tedious twist of the deserted ways which lay between Mrs. Martin and her company. By the time he had gained his own house his uppermost thought was a regret that such a trifle had been all he could do for the poor ould dacint body—the Lord might pity her.

It was, however, by no means a trifle to the poor old body herself. For the first few days after her acquisition of the image it took up a wonderful deal of her time and thoughts. Even when she was not standing at gaze in front of it she but seldom lost it from her sight. Her eyes were continually turning towards the niche, whence it seemed strangely to dominate the room. Its clear whiteness made a mark for the feeblest gleam of ebbing daylight or fading embers; it was the last object to be muffled under bat’s-wing gloom, and the first to creep back when morning glimmered in again. She dusted it superfluously many times a day, with a proud pleasure always somewhat dashed by the remembrance that she could exhibit it to no neighbours, who would say, with variations, “Ah! glory be among us, Mrs. Martin, ma’am, but that’s rael iligant entirely. Och woman, dear, did you ever see the like of that now at all, at all?”

Still, the most marvellous piece of sculpture ever chiselled would probably betray deficiencies if adopted as one’s sole companion in life; and Mrs. Martin’s little statuette had obvious shortcomings when so regarded. As the winter wore on the weight of her solitude pressed more and more heavily. The bad weather increased her isolation. Some days there were of bitter frost and snow, and some of streaming rain, and many of wild wind. Once or twice Tim Doran brought her a double supply of provisions, and did not return for a fortnight, and then she felt indeed cut adrift. By-and-bye her vague disconsolateness began to take shape in more definite terrors. She was beset with surmises of ill-disposed vagrants tramping that way to practise unforbidden on her wretched life, and she crept trembling to and from the pool where she filled her water-can. Or ghostly fears overcame her, and she thought at night that she heard the little dead children keening in the deserted room next door, and that mysterious shadows went past the windows, and unseen hands rattled the latch. But through all her shifting mist of trouble the alabaster Virgin shone on her steadily with just a ray of consolation. Every night she said her Rosary before the niche, and almost always her devotions ended in a prayer of her own especial wishing and wording.

“Ah, Lady dear,” she would say, “wouldn’t you think now to be sendin’ me a bit of company? me that’s left as disolit as the ould top of Slieve Moyneran this great while back. Ah, wouldn’t you then, me Lady? Sure if that’s a thrue likeness of you at all, there’s the look on you that it’s plased you’d be to do a poor body e’er a good turn, ay, is there, bedad. And I couldn’t tell you the comfort ’twould be to me, not if I was all night tellin.’ Just a neighbour droppin’ in now and agin’, acushla, I wouldn’t make bold to ax