"
After all, I did not hear Uncle Luke's story from my godmother but from
Maureen Kelly.
Maureen was now getting old, and she had a room allotted to herself at
the extreme end of the left wing which looked out on the gable of the
Abbey and the graves which are all that remain of the old Abbey from
which the house takes its name.
To be sure the grass grows up to the empty window-sockets of the gable;
and as for the graves they are clean blotted out in the prairie grass
that is like the grey waves of the sea above them.
It is a narrow slip of a room, and she sits there and sews, mending the
linen which is old and thin and darning finely the holes in the damask
cloth or the rents which time has made in my grandmother's lace; and
when the light fails her knitting those stockings of fine blue-grey wool
which my grandfather always wears.
Maureen, as often happens with old privileged servants, quarrels with
the other servants and is not much sought after by them. She lives in a
great independence of her own, and has her own cups and saucers; they
are fine old china, with brown sea-shells and seaweed upon them, and
they belonged to the nursery when I was the one child there.
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