- servant who opened the door. "I shall forget my head
one day."
"Sure, Miss Eileen," said the girl, "but never the dear heart of you, at all, at all."
Eileen's mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of Heaven. Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she swept off the sofa with a careless hand.
"Won't you take a seat then?"
I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when Eileen was all those years under German rule.
"Not at all," said the lady. "I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille as to London."
Two of her boys had been killed in the war, "fighting," she said, "for an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland," and two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on American newspapers. Eileen's two sisters had married during the war and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen's father had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.
"The dear man thought all the world of Eileen," said Mrs. O'Connor. "I was out of it entirely when he had her by his side."
"You'll be lonely," said Brand, "when your daughter goes abroad again."
Eileen answered him.
"Oh, you can't keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty novels which keep her from ascending straight to Heaven without the necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in touch with those she loves, in this world or the other.
