is comfortable for an old woman--'"

"But the house isn't mine. It's Alan Donn Campbell's. It isn't mine to
give, and I haven't the money to buy it. All the money I have is my pay
and what my uncles give me--and they won't see you want."

"But isn't it the grand rich Northern family you are? And won't there be
money coming to you when your uncles and mother die?"

"I suppose so."

"Well now, agra, a few of us have been thinking. And Manus McGinty, the
priest's brother, is willing to advance you the money at interest, to be
paid him when your people die. And you can buy the house, and a slip of
a pig I can be fattening against the Christmas market."

"No!"

"Och, agra," she whined, "you wouldn't go back on the words of the poor
girl, and her dying in my arms? And she was thinking of you when she
should have been thinking of her God! And the grand subtle things she
said of you, that only a woman can understand! Sure it was of love for
you she died, you being away so long from her on the salt and bitter
sea--"

"Listen, woman Dolan. I heard how Moyra died as I came through the
village. She died as she was beating my poor old hound. She dropped dead
from the passion in her, like a shot man. So where's all your love and
your long dying wishes as she lay in your arms?"

He arose and walked away from her, through the haggard, under the sky,
where the southeast cloud-banks rolled steadily toward the placid moon.
And there was silence for an instant, so speechless he left her. And
then suddenly her ancient shrill voice cut the air like a drover's
whip:

"You Orange bastard!"

Section 12

The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his
wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out
not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any
grievance against God such as little men might have. But a strange dumb
wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister,
her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering
candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as
of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden crucifix. And
no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the great
hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake the ash
from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No longe