way to the defeat of the Boyne Water.... She might
have seemed nothing but a pretty lady's maid in London or Dublin but in
North Louth she was like a queen....

Her looks were her tragedy, for she held herself too good for a
laboring man to marry, and, having no dower, no farmer would have her.
Among the peasantry romance does not count, but land. And if the Queen
of Sheba, and she having nothing but her shift, were to offer herself in
marriage to a strong farmer, he would refuse her for the cross-eyed
woman in the next townland who had twenty acres and five good milch
cows.... Only for the very rich or the very poor is romance!

Her only chance for marriage was a matter of luck. She would have to
meet some government official, or some medical student home on his
holidays, or some small merchant whom her beauty would unbalance, as
drink would unbalance him. And she must dazzle, and her old mother play
and catch him, as a jack pike is dazzled by a spoon bait, hooked, and
brought ashore. She might marry or might miss, or grow into an acidulous
red-headed woman. It was a matter of luck. And her luck was in. She met
young Shane Campbell.

They danced together. They wandered in the moonlight. They met in the
country lanes. And they were very silent, she because she played a game,
and a counter is better than a lead, and he because he was in love with
her. Had it been only a matter of sweethearting, he would have been
merry as a singing bird, full of chatter, roughing it with her for a
kiss. But it was love with him, and a thing for life, and life was long
and more serious than death.... So he was silent.

He was silent when he went home for a week, silent with uncles Robin and
Alan, who sensed he was going through one of the crises of adolescence,
and knew the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He was silent with
his mother, who saw nothing, cared nothing, so intent was she on
revolving within herself as inexorably as the planets revolve in space.
He decided to spend the last days of his leave in Dundalk. And at the
railroad station in Ballymena he hazarded a look at Alan Donn.

"Uncle Alan--" and he stopped.

"What is it, laddie? Is it a girl troubling you? Take my advice and look
her in the eyes and, 'You can love me or leave me, and to hell with
you!' tell her. 'Do you see this right foot of mine?' says you. 'Well,
it's pointed to the next townland, where there's just as pretty a one as
you.' And you'll find