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back again.
    She felt tired and sick, her head thudding, and she put her hands to her breasts more than once in awareness of the cysts there. She knelt with her head low between her elbows in the chair, changing position for any distraction, the words she repeated as intrusive as dust in her mouth while the pain of weariness obtruded itself over everything that made up her consciousness.
    She knew she must see a doctor, but she’d known that months before, and she had done nothing. She’d first discovered the cysts last August as she dried herself at Malone’s Island, a bathing-place in the lake, not more than ten minutes through the meadows; and she remembered her fright and incomprehension when she touched the right breast again with the towel and how the noise of singing steel from the sawmill in the woods pierced every other sound in the evening.
    What the doctor would do was simple. He’d send her for a biopsy. She might be told the truth or she might not when they got the result back, depending on them and on herself. If she had cancer she’d be sent for treatment. She had been a nurse. She had no illusions about what would happen.
    She had been only away from the house once since she was married. She shuddered at how miserable she’d been those three days, the first blight on her happiness.
    A cousin had invited her to her wedding in Dublin. She’d no desire to go, but that she had been remembered so surprised her with delight that she told them about the letter at the dinner hour.
    â€œYou might as well take the chance when you get it. It mightn’t be offered again. It’d be a break for you. It’d take you out of yourself for a few days,” she was pressed to go.
    â€œBut look at the cost! The train fare. The hotel. A wedding present for Nuala. And how on earth would I get past those shop windows full of things without spending every penny we have?” she laughed.
    â€œNever you mind, girl. If the money’s wanted it’ll be always found,” Reegan said.
    â€œWhy don’t you go, Elizabeth, when you get the chance?” Willie asked wonderingly.
    â€œWho’d look after the place while I was away, Willie?”
    â€œThat’s a poor excuse,” Reegan said. “There’s no fear of the auld barracks takin’ flight while you’re away, though more’s the pity!”
    â€œAnd what if some one ran away with you when I was gone?” she asked flirtatiously.
    â€œNot a fear, girl,” he laughed. “Every dog for his day but you, you girl, it’s your day.”
    She was flattered and satisfied. She would not go. Here they had need of her. What would she be at the wedding? A seat at the bottom of the breakfast-table, a relative who had married a widower in the country, a parable to those who had known her as a young girl.
    â€œI think you should go, Elizabeth. I’d go if I was in your place, definitely,” Willie persuaded with obstinate persistence.
    â€œBut who’d cook and wash and bake and sew, Willie?”
    â€œWe would, Elizabeth. We’d stop from school in turn. We could buy loaves.…”
    â€œYou only think you could, Willie,” she tried to laugh it off nervously.
    â€œWe’d manage somehow,” he enthused, heedless of his child’s place in the house, he gestured excitedly with his hands and went on too quickly to be stopped.
    â€œI think you’d be foolish to miss Dublin. Not many people ever get to Dublin. For the few days we’d be well able to manage. Shure, Elizabeth, didn’t we manage for ages before you ever came?”
    It fell as natural as a blessing, “Didn’t we manage for ages before you ever came?” And they’d manage, too, if she was gone. She stood with the shock. She must have been holding something for she remembered not to let it fall. Then she broke down.
    She thought she’d never be able to climb the stairs to her