Page:Darby O'Gill and the Good People by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh (1903).djvu/236

Rh “Little childher’ll come,” she says, “an’ their soft, warm arrums will hould you away. By-and-by you’ll not go where I’m laid at all, an’ all thoughts of these few happy months we’ve spent together— Oh! Mother in Heaven, how happy they were⸺”

The girl started to her elbow, for, sharp an’ sudden, a wild, wailing cry just outside the windy startled the shuddering darkness. ’Twas a long cry of terror and of grief, not shrill, but piercing as a knife-thrust. Every hair on Darby’s head stood up an’ pricked him like a needle. ’Twas the banshee!

“Whist, listen!” says Eileen. “Oh, Cormac asthore, it’s come for me again!” With that, stiff with terror, she buried herself undher the pillows.

A second cry follyed the first, only this time it was longer, and rose an’ swelled into a kind of a song that broke at last into the heart-breakingest moan that ever fell on mortial ears. “Ochone!” it sobbed.

The knowledgeable man, his blood turned to ice, his legs thremblin’ like a hare’s, stood looking in spite of himself at the black windy-panes, expecting some frightful wision.

Afther that second cry the woice balanced itself up an’ down into the awful death keen. One word made Rh