answered that I had none. He did not believe
me and said he was sure I must have one. I was silent.

"Tell us," said Mahony pertly to the man, "how many have you yourself?"

The man smiled as before and said that when he was our age he had lots
of sweethearts.

"Every boy," he said, "has a little sweetheart."

His attitude on this point struck me as strangely liberal in a man
of his age. In my heart I thought that what he said about boys and
sweethearts was reasonable. But I disliked the words in his mouth and I
wondered why he shivered once or twice as if he feared something or felt
a sudden chill. As he proceeded I noticed that his accent was good. He
began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had
and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they
seemed to be if one only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so
much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her
beautiful soft hair. He gave me the impression that he was repeating
something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some
words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in
the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some
fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke
mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not
wish others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again,
varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued
to gaze towards the foot of the slope, listening to him.

After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying
that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without
changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us
towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone.
After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

"I say! Look what he's doing!"

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:

"I say... He's a queer old josser!"

"In case he asks us for our names," I said "let you be Murphy and I'll
be Smith."

We said nothing further to each other. I was still considering whether
I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down beside us
again. Hardly had he sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat
which had escaped him, sprang up and pursued her across the field. The
man and I watched the chase. The cat esc