Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word: He had been a school friend of her father. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. That was a long time ago she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Her father was not so bad then and besides, her mother was alive. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field, the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it, not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. The man out of the last house passed on his way home she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
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