sual, and his
shock of tow-coloured hair jutting from beneath an unnoticeable round
cap, looked more than ever like thatch over his blinking blue eyes. When
they had gone a few yards in silence he suddenly said musingly--

"I dunno why he wouldn't have as good a right to be bringin' her
anythin' she had a fancy for off the bog in a pitaty-creel, as me to be
buyin' her len'ths of hijis-coloured ribbons to make a show of herself
wid. But all the same, I'd as lief he'd let it alone. For some raison or
other I've the wish in me mind I was slingin' the whole of it into one
of thim bog-houles out there--and that 'ud be no thing to go do on
her.... And that was a quare story the ould woman had about thim
gettin' married. Somebody was apt to be makin' a fool of her. Who was it
would be tellin' her I won'er?"

But old Moggy partly overheard and said: "Thim that knew what they was
talkin' about, supposin' it's any affair of yours."

So he did the rest of his meditating inaudibly. He said to himself that
he was steppin' home straight--continuing the while to walk in quite the
opposite direction--and that he wouldn't be goin' to the Joyces' place
to-night at all; what 'ud bring him there, and it gettin' so late? But
of course he went there, as surely as a swimming bubble goes over the
cataract's smooth lip, or a fascinated little bird down the snake's
throat.

For the sensation which he had begun to experience, and which was a
strong one, and strange to him, was nothing less than jealousy. He was
jealous of that pitaty-creel.

When he came to the place Ody's aunt had told of, he found a group of
young Joyces and Ryans and others gathered among the boulders and bushes
in a circle of which the heap of bog-cotton formed the centre; and a
glance having showed him that it included Denis and Theresa, he sat down
facing them, and said to himself:

"If I'd known, now, it was bog-cotton she was wantin', I could ha' been
gadrin' her plinty last night after I come home. There's a gran' big
moon these times, wid lashin's and lavin's of light to be gettin' thim
kind of glimmerin' things by. I seen a black place below between the
sthrame of wather and the roadside all waved over white wid it, like as
if it was a fall of snow thryin' could it flutter off away wid itself
agin out of the world. I'd have got her enough to fill a six-fut sack.
What for didn't the crathur tell me?"

Pursuing these and other such reflections Hugh's attention, w