Clorinda was silent. She turned her face to where the girls were now playing at the edge of the water, with the goat bounding in circles all about them and the image came to her of Aisling escaping the room she had shared with poor suffering Maire, only to go into the street and try to sleep in an old baby carriage.

Taking Clorinda’s silence for a hesitation, Maeve McKinnon went on, ‘you know how correctly we will take care of Aisling, don’t you? We will be as parents to her.’

‘I know that,’ said Clorinda. ‘I do not doubt it at all. But I cannot be the one to decide. I will write to my brother. I will describe your beautiful world of consolations.’

‘Let him see it as a kind of homecoming for Aisling,’ said Elizabeth. ‘For she now sleeps in what was once your grandfather’s house. Surely, that is fitting?’

Knowing Michael as she did, Clorinda wrote only a short letter, taking care not to emphasise how the life Aisling was now tasting was so profoundly superior to that which he had offered her, nor saying anything about adopted goats or new friends, but merely suggesting that he and Kathleen be spared the burden of caring for her for a while and that the sea air would return to them a happy and healthy child when the autumn came.

Given Michael’s antipathy towards the schemes and designs of other people as they touched upon his own life, Clorinda expected him to demand Aisling’s immediate return to Dublin, but what he wrote in reply was strangely unexpected.

He first related how he had at last found the will to return to his work at the Anchor Brewery and then went on:

… the thing which has brought me a little back to myself and to life is the knowledge that I am to be a father again. Kathleen will give birth in the late winter and I have good hopes that the child will be a boy and that we will once again be a proper family.

As to she whom I will now call our ‘middle child’, let her stay at her pleasure with her new guardians and not burden us with her vexing crossness and habits of refusal. We are still grieving for Maire. The daily behaviour of the middle child had become impossible for us to endure and I do not wish to burden Kathleen with anyone or anything which could endanger the safe carrying of our son into the world. It is fortunate for all concerned that Aisling has been given hospitality elsewhere. If the Misses McKinnon have need of money for her sustenance, please give it to them and I will repay you, if you so wish, in due time.

It was now incumbent upon Clorinda to ask Aisling whether she truly wanted to remain in County Clare when she herself went back to England. She tried to imagine how the girl thought about her parents and their treatment of her, knowing that children who are not loved may often persist in the sad adoration of those by whom they are rejected. That Aisling never spoke about her mother and father did not necessarily mean that she did not mourn them.