I never dared to ask her who the young man was. She was kind to me, but she kept me at arm's-length by her terrible sadness, and infant curiosity was the last thing she encouraged. Her face was pale, her thin yellow hair was pale, and her blue eyes were pale. Those faded hues suited the melancholy of her smile and regard.
Seeing me persecuted and unhappy, she took me under her protection, and would let me sit for hours at her feet in the storeroom, while she mended linen.
I read to her, and when I was tired of reading I told her stories of my past. Like grown-up mourners, it relieved me to talk of my sorrow and describe the paradise down there beside the pond and the applewoman's stall.
She listened with mild interest, and I was not so engrossed in my own troubles as not to remark the sadness of Mrs. Clement. The children up-stairs were sure she had committed some dreadful murder, and was brooding in remorseful reminiscence. They did not like her, because she once scolded them for their treatment of me; but nothing they could say would induce me to think ill of my melancholy friend, and I continued to sit at her feet and watch her in wonder and awe.
Her niece Eily came into our service shortly afterwards. She had a beautiful fresh face like a wild-flower, made up of sweet dark-blue eyes, a blossom of a mouth, and morning hues upon her cheek. She was a girl made to beguile sense and sternness, and transform the lion to a lamb. Everybody immediately loved her, she had such a delicious way of saying "Ah, sure!" and lifting up a pair of the most Irish of eyes in bewitching appeal.
My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.
The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by which the eldest boy was called.