Clorinda found a Luncheon Room which sold hot pork sausages and bread rolls. She ordered a jug of milk and four sausages and butter for the rolls and she and Aisling made a grand feast together, not caring if grease from sausages ran down their chins, and loving the milk, which was fresh from the herds of Kildare and full of cream.

When this was done, Clorinda ordered coffee, which her niece had never tasted, then sat back and looked at Aisling. She was no beauty.

Her expression tended towards sourness as well as sadness, her complexion was blue-pale and her eyes were narrow. But enlivened by the work and the food and the coffee, she appeared to Clorinda like someone who had been absent from life and was now beginning to rejoin it. With strands of dark hair escaping from her bonnet and her cheeks an excited kind of red, she was almost pretty, and Clorinda now suddenly saw how she might save her, at least for a while, from her loveless life.

She began talking to Aisling about her own grandfather and the place where he had lived on the shore of County Clare opposite the Aran Islands. She said she had a longing to return there, to run on the strand, to gather pink cowrie shells, to hear the gannets calling. Then she asked her niece if she would like to make the journey with her to this place and watch the sun go down over the ocean and sleep in the silence of the wind. And the girl said yes, she longed to go away from Dublin, from the rain-soaked street and the crying babies and from the room where her mother came in at night to weep for the dead.

When Michael and Kathleen protested that Clorinda couldn’t take Aisling away from them, (as she knew they would) she said nothing. She simply placed before Michael a Bank Draft, made payable to Mr Michael Morrissey of 12 Bishop Street, accompanied by a formal Note of Endorsement, stating that this was ‘the sum of money still rightly owing to him and agreed by both parties, as his family’s share of the ruby necklace, designated an appanage of the Morrissey family’ and saw his face lift itself from contemplation of the coals and break into a wintry smile. She did not tell him that her savings were now all spent.

‘Take her, then,’ said Michael, his eyes still fixed on the satisfactory arithmetic before him on the table. ‘See if she likes grubbing for cockles in the sand.’

It was a long journey, by coach and by cart, but the weather was kind and the feeling of travelling westwards, back towards the place where she’d been happy as a girl, enthralled Clorinda. And she saw Aisling, who had never been out of Dublin, enter a state of marvellous dreaming at the sight of the green hills and the groves of ash and the hedgerows in summer leaf.