out for a breath of cool
air over the baked crevasses of the bog, or more often down their only
road; a track that flattered the dignity of Roscarna at the lodge gates
but degenerated as it approached Clonderriff.

In the full glare of daylight Clonderriff, for all Mr. Considine's
labours, was a sordid collection of cabins, whitened without, but full
of peat-smoke and the odours of cattle within. The cabins stood on the
brow of a hill. In winter they seemed to crouch beneath a sweeping
wind--and the grass thatchings would have been whirled away if they had
not been kept in position by ropes that were weighted with stones. The
small irregular plots in which the villagers grew their potatoes were
bounded by dry walls through crevices of which the wind whistled
shrilly, and scattered with boulders too deeply imbedded to be worth
the labour of moving, and the walls and boulders were alike covered
with an ashen lichen that made them look as if they were crusted over
with bitter salt that the wind had carried in from sea. Between the
garden plots lay a wilderness of common land, on which lean cattle
grazed or routed among heaps of decaying garbage: in winter a
desolation, in summer a purgatory of flies. But with the coming of
evening and a softer air Clonderriff became transformed. One saw no
longer the sordid details, only the long and level lines of the bog,
the white-washed cabins shining milky as elder-blossom in moonlight,
their windows bloomed with candlelight. In every cranny of the garden
walls the crickets began their tingling chorus, but every other living
thing in the village seemed at rest.

Often, when she felt lonely, Gabrielle would walk down the road to
Clonderriff, not because she found it beautiful, as it surely was, but
for the sake of its homeliness and the contrast of its gentle life to
the moribund atmosphere of Roscarna. She loved the pale cabins, each a
cradle of mysterious life; she loved the sound of placid cattle feeding
in the darkness, and above all she loved the sound of human voices when
the men sprawled by the roadside telling old stories, and the tall,
barefooted women stood above them very slim in their folded shawls.
Sometimes as she passed quietly along the road, she would become
conscious, without hearing, of human presences, and see a pair of
lovers sitting on the end of a stone wall with their lips together, and
then she would return to Roscarna full of wonder and excitement.