Then I asked her how the woman was doing.
'She's nearly lost,' said the old woman; 'she won't be alive at all
tomorrow morning. They have no boards to make her a coffin, and
they'll want to borrow the boards that a man below has had this two
years to bury his mother, and she alive still. I heard them saying
there are two more women with the fever, and a child that's not
three. The Lord have mercy on us all!'
I went out again to look over the sea, but night had fallen and the
hurricane was howling over the Dun. I walked down the lane and heard
the keening in the house where the young man was. Further on I could
see a stir about the door of the cottage that had been last struck
by typhus. Then I turned back again in the teeth of the rain, and
sat over the fire with the old man and woman talking of the sorrows
of the people till it was late in the night.
This evening the old man told me a story he had heard long ago on
the mainland: -
There was a young woman, he said, and she had a child.
