Читать книгу The Valley of Squinting Windows онлайн

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"What is the matter, mother?" said John Brennan.

"It was how I was thinking that maybe it would be better now if you had nothing to do with the Shannons."

"But it was very kind of Mr. Shannon to invite me."

"I know, I know; but I'd rather than the world it was any other family at all only the Shannons. They're a curious clan."

In the painful silence that had come upon them she too was thinking of the reasons from which her words had sprung. Of how Henry Shannon had failed to marry her after he had ruined her; of how the disgrace had done no harm at all to him with his money and his fine farm. Then there was the burning thought of how he had married Grace Gogarty, the proudest and grandest girl in the whole parish, and of how this young man had been born prematurely and, by a curious chance, about the same time as her own little child. The one thing that she always dreaded more than any other, in the pain of its remembrance, was the fact that Henry Shannon had married Grace Gogarty directly after the "honeymoon" with her in Dublin. Yes, it was hardest of all to think of that, and of how Grace Gogarty had so held up her head all through the short period of her wedded life with Henry Shannon. And after his death she had gone about with such conceited sorrowfulness in her widow's weeds.