Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/36

 on the dresser, where plates and jugs stood in rows. They were free with all that was in the house. This was not Mrs. Cassidy's way with hens. In the old days an intruding fowl, unless it were a chicken in delicate health, was ruthlessly driven from the door. Now Mrs. Cassidy was apathetic.

It is only very good friends who can sit opposite each other without speaking. Silence is usually embarrassing to civilised people. I confess that our long silence began to embarrass me, and it came as a relief when Mrs. Cassidy began to speak. Her words fell from her slowly and scarcely seemed to be addressed to me. It was rather as if she spoke a monologue, telling to the brooding spirit of her home the tale of her sorrow.

"It was three years ago that the fancy first took him. Before that he was always contented enough."

I knew she was speaking about her boy—her son, who had gone to America.

"His name," she added, "was Michael Antony; but it was Sonny we called him."

I waited, for I had nothing to say. There are scores of these sonnies, whose names are really something else. The mother love that cleaves to the pet name is the same for all of them; so is the heartbreak for the mother.

"I don't rightly know," she went on, "how the notion of America came to him first. You'd think he was contented enough. It wasn't that his father was hard on him. The lad had no more to do than