Meggie pulled a square of white towel from the huge pile sitting by the stove warming and spread it carefully on the work table, then lifted the crying child out of the wicker crib. The Cleary hair glittered sparsely on his little skull as Meggie changed his diaper swiftly, and as efficiently as her mother could have done.

  "Little Mother Meggie," Frank said, to tease her. "I'm not!" she answered indignantly. "I'm just helping Mum." "I know," he said gently. "You're a good girl, wee Meggie." He tugged at the white taffeta bow on the back of her head until it hung lopsided. Up came the big grey eyes to his face adoringly; over the nodding head of the baby she might have been his own age, or older. There was a pain in his chest, that this should have fallen upon her at an age when the only baby she ought to be caring for was Agnes, now relegated forgotten to the bedroom. If it wasn't for her and their mother, he would have been gone long since. He looked at his father sourly, the cause of the new life creating such chaos in the house. Served him right, getting done out of his shed.

  Somehow the other boys and even Meggie had never intruded on his thoughts the way Hal did; but when Fee's waistline began to swell this time, he was old enough himself to be married and a father. Everyone except little Meggie had been uncomfortable about it, his mother especially. The furtive glances of the boys made her shrink like a rabbit; she could not meet Frank's eyes or quench the shame in her own. Nor should any woman go through that, Frank said to himself for the thousandth time, remembering the horrifying moans and cries which had come from her bedroom the night Hal was born; of age now, he hadn't been packed off elsewhere like the others. Served Daddy right, losing his shed.

  A decent man would have left her alone. His mother's head in the new electric light was spun gold, the pure profile as she looked down the long table at Paddy unspeakably beautiful. How had someone as lovely and refined as she married an itinerant shearer from the bogs of Galway? Wasting herself and her Spode china, her damask table napery and her Persian rugs in the parlor that no one ever saw, because she didn't fit in with the wives of Paddy's peers. She made them too conscious of their vulgar loud voices, their bewilderment when faced with more than one fork. Sometimes on a Sunday she would go into the lonely parlor, sit down at the spinet under the window and play,