Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/142

130 live with any longer, shouting, "Your house, is it? I 'll show yeh whose house it is! I 'll show yeh! I 'll break ev'ry danged thing in the place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been Greenwich village, as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.

The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before—years before—in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The past, despite its poverty and starvation, had been as dear as life. She had suffered all those pangs of dissolution that assail the home-loving Irish when they have to leave what association has made dear to them; for, with the Irish, familiarity does not breed contempt but affection.

She suffered these same miseries now. She saw her home through tears of regret—though unhappiness had driven her from it. And her lips were set in a determination never to return to Cregan, though her chin trembled with pity of herself in the determination.

Some distance behind her came a smaller woman, as shrunken, as withered, and as yellow as an old leaf.