Now, his mother filled the room, during the long, sleepless hours of her night, with the moan of her prayers and pious ejaculations. He could not bear to go up there, knowing that the room must have changed since she moved into it to begin her long, tedious preparations for death.

So, listening to her footsteps on the bare boards, he could not follow her movements, could not guess where she kept her money, their money, the fruit of Rosnagree. Did she guess at his fear of her? Was that why she resented him so much? She could not bear Frank to be beholden to him, not even for ten miserable shillings. Remembering the sound of her footsteps treading so surely across the room above, he complained, I never asked her for anything. I never wanted a thing from her. And yet, she always wanted me to think that it was I who made her suffer. She made me her Cross.

*

Damn little cause she had; not even his full fees at the seminary did she have to pay – they were met to some extent, at best, by his grand-uncle in South America. No, he thought with satisfaction, he owed her nothing.

He went to the cupboard and pushed the note into the nearest jar, then turned away, brushing his hands together. Nothing he owed her. Nothing.

*

He came into the kitchen at Rosnagree, hot and sweaty, out of the glare of the sun. He was working with Owen at the hay, and he had come to refill the gallon can with tea. He knew from the guilty way she moved that he had surprised her, and searching the dimness of the room, he noticed that Owen’s coat hung on the back of the door and that she half-stuffed some papers back into the pocket of it.

“I gave that fellow a list for the creamery,” she murmured, seeing his glance. “God knows what he did with it.” (It was always “that fellow,” never her son Owen, the heir to the farm, which she held only in trust.)

“I’ll tell him,” he said; “maybe he has it with him.”

“Oh, sha, don’t bother.” She took the can from him hastily and went to the teapot simmering in the ashes. “I don’t know what the blazes he does with things.”

But he knew what she had been after. All that summer, Owen’s girl, Marie, had been writing, sometimes two letters by the same post, and Owen used to wait on the road, for fear the postman would bring the letters to the house. Whenever he could find no excuse to get away, he sent Tom (home on holidays from the seminary) to waylay the postman and to claim for him the plump envelope with the English postmark and the careful, childish handwriting.