It must be raining there, too, raining down on the trees and the fields and on the house where it stood at the end of the lane from the village. The lane was a mile long — a long ride for anyone on a bicycle — but the postman would have arrived, with the letter she had sent to them secretly the day before yesterday, when they were still here with her, and Lily would have been on the watch for him, to give him the letter for her mother. And the letter would come into Dublin on the night train, and it would be here in the morning. Well, Mrs. Bagot thought, with luck she would have it in the morning, but if it came in the morning post, she would have to give it to Martin — he would be sure to ask if there was a letter from Lily, so that he could take it along to the office to show his friends what a clever daughter he had. And then ten chances to one she would never see it again. It would stay there in the office and get mixed up in the papers on his desk and maybe be thrown out, unless someone took it. She would ask Martin to bring it back, and he would promise to bring it to her, but he would forget, and she might ask him the second time but not the third time — it was too much like nagging. And all this brought home to her how little she meant to anyone in the world except the children. And Bennie and the cats. Martin objected to the animals, and he had told her to get rid of them, but she refused to get rid of them. She had stood up to him there. Anyway, he hardly saw them. He woke up late, naturally enough, considering how late at night he had to work, and she brought him up his breakfast on a tray, and then he dressed himself and went off and came back in the early hours of the morning. He did not like her to wait up for him, and besides she couldn’t and still get enough sleep to be able to give proper attention to the children. But she would always wait up for him if she thought that was what he wanted. But the times she had been up, when he got home at eleven o’clock, for example, instead of at one or two — at those times he had come in and hung his coat and hat in the hall and gone straight upstairs to his room without even saying good night to her. There were times when it seemed that he could not control his dislike of her, and yet she knew very well he did not dislike her. One night, not so very long ago, he had come into the front bedroom where she slept and waked her and asked her to heat up some milk for him, and when she brought him the milk he thanked her and told her he did not know what he would do without her. She had gone back to her own bed and lain there in an ecstasy of gratitude — a gratitude she did not understand and did not question. She knew positively that everything was going to be all right, and she was so sure of that — that everything was going to be all right — that she did not even wonder what she meant, or who or what it was she was thinking about. She only knew that her memory had lighted up and that all she remembered were times so happy that they must surely cast their radiance far into the future, over years so far ahead that she could not even dream of them.