w of the matter, recognised
with reluctance the futility of pitting himself singly against three
opponents, two of them better men than he, who was "no great things at
all, let alone havin' one knee quare." Therefore he turned his back upon
the controversy, and feigned unconsciousness of it, instead of bouncing
up and saying with appropriate action, "And I'd like to know who at
all's got a better right to it than herself has?"

His defection aggrieved her so bitterly, that the fiercest of her wrath
turned upon him; and after a wrangle wherein all the parties concerned
had made liberal use of those "aculeate and proper" words against which
the wary Bacon warns his quarrelling readers, she flounced away into the
darkness of the small hours of the stormy December morning, loudly
avowing her determination never to see a sight of the ugly, dirty,
mane-spirited poltroon, or open her lips to him as long as she had an
eye or a tongue in her head. Jeering laughter followed her exit on a
skirl of sleet-fledged wind.

She seethed over her anger for many a long mile, to such fierceness was
its flame fed by disappointment and more potent jealousy. For had not
Thady, the only person she cared much about in all the world, turned
against her and sided with Maggie, "who was always a greedy grabbin'
little toad ever since she stood the height of a creepy stool?" It was
an hour or so before daybreak when she sat down to rest under an immense
bulging boulder that loomed dimly on her beside the road a little way
beyond Lisconnel. Then she began to look backwards and forwards. Far
back to the time when her father kept a little shop in Bantry, before he
was stone broke one bad year and took to carrying the remnant of his
stock-in-trade about in a basket as a higgler, which eventually led
other members of his family to wander, less reputably, for their
livelihoods. She remembered that even in those days Thady was always her
ally, and had lamed himself for life by a fall on the road when running
to rescue her from the Hutchinsons' wicked mastiff, who had knocked her
down near their gate, and was standing over her with a growl and a grin
of which she still sometimes dreamed. And again she remembered how once
she had been laid up for a long while with the fever, and had crept out
of the Union infirmary to find that her relations, supposing her dead,
had all "tuk off wid thimselves to the States," and was keening like one
demented over her desert