Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/34

 ney corner, crouching over a fire that had burned low. There was a great round pot at her feet, with glowing cinders underneath it and grey, ash-covered coals piled on its lid. In such pots the west of Ireland people bake their bread, and Mrs. Cassidy, no doubt, had a loaf in hers; but she was not watching her pot.

I got accustomed to the gloom of the house and I could see that her eyes were fixed on something beyond the pot, beyond the chimney corner and beyond the house itself. They had a long, sorrowful look in them. For a while she seemed unconscious that we were in the room with her. Her husband roused her.

"Do you not see," he said, "that his reverence is here? Will you not give him a chair the way he'll be able to take an air of the fire? He's wet through so he is."

Mrs. Cassidy's courtesy overcame the weakness that was on her. She stood up and bowed to me with that air of quiet, unassertive dignity which the west of Ireland peasant possesses in common with the best-bred members of the English aristocracy. Neither squalor, on the one hand, nor the surroundings of the smart set, on the other, can rob a woman of this great-lady manner if it is born in her.

Having bowed, Mrs. Cassidy drew forward a chair and wiped the seat of it with her apron.