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Keogh called her to come in and look at "the child," who being a new and unique possession was liable to develop alarmingly strange symptoms, and had now "woke up wid his head that hot, you might as well put your hand on the hob of the grate." Mrs. Kilfoyle stayed only long enough to suggest, as a possible remedy, a drop of two-milk whey.
Joyce had been left entirely to her own choice in the matter, I think she would have bequeathed it to her younger daughter Theresa, notwithstanding that custom clearly designated Bessy Kilfoyle, the eldest of the family, as the heiress.
"Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for us then," said Mrs. Quigley. "Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from," suggested Brian Kilfoyle, hopefully. "It's apt to stay there, then," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "for any signs I can see."
Kilfoyle's door, before she knew that there was anybody near. He was a tall, elderly man, gaunt and grizzled, very ragged, and so miserable-looking that Mrs. Kilfoyle could have felt nothing but compassion for him had he not carried over his shoulder a bunch of shiny cans, which was to her mind as satisfactory a passport as a ticket-of-leave.
Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and sorra a bit of me will agin."
Kilfoyle, who stood in the rain, the disconsolate centre of the group about her door; all women and children except old Johnny Keogh, who was so bothered and deaf, that he grasped new situations slowly and feebly, and had now an impression of somebody's house being on fire. "He must ha' took off wid himself the instiant me back was turned, for ne'er a crumb had he touched of the pitaties."
Kilfoyle was for a while inclined to the same opinion, until one day by chance she espied in the little old tin box which contained Theresa's treasures, a roll of bright yellow ribbon wrapped up very carefully; and thenceforward she silently ceased to hope that things might all come right yet, if Denis O'Meara came back again on leave. So, although Mrs.
Kilfoyle said, "I'd liefer than a great deal they kep' out of it. Ne'er a one of the lot of them I ever beheld but had the eyes rowlin' in his head wid villiny. And the childer, goodness help them, do be worse than the grown people." And Ody Rafferty's aunt said, "Bad cess to the whole of them." For in Lisconnel nobody has a good word to say of the Tinkers.
Thus did she seek to make amends for the speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing heavily upon her conscience. The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again, the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died.
And to improve the occasion for her juniors, old Mrs. Keogh added, "Ay, and morebetoken you'd ha' been committin' a sin." But Mrs. Kilfoyle replied with much candour, "'Deed, then, I'd a dale liefer be after committin' a sin, or a dozen sins, than to have me poor mother's good cloak thieved away on me, and walkin' wild about the world." As it happened the fate of Mrs.
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