ut the working of the Robeen factory which startled him. He was
travelling home by rail. It happened to be Friday, and, as usual in
the early summer, the train was crowded with emigrants on their way to
Queenstown. The familiar melancholy crowd waited on every platform.
Old women weeping openly and men with faces ridiculously screwed and
puckered in the effort to restrain the rising tears clung to their sons
and daughters. Pitiful little boxes and carpet bags were piled on
the platform. Friends clung to hands outstretched through the
carriage-windows while the train moved slowly out. Then came the long
mournful wail from those left behind, and the last wavings of farewell.
At the Robeen station the crowd was no less than elsewhere. The
carriages set apart for the emigrants were full, and at the last minute
two girls were hustled into the compartment where Hyacinth sat. A woman,
their mother, mumbled and slobbered over their hands. An old man, too
old to be their father, shouted broken benedictions to them. Two
young men--lovers, perhaps, or brothers--stood red-eyed, desolate and
helpless, without speaking. After the train had started Hyacinth looked
at the girls. One of them, a pretty creature of perhaps eighteen years
old, wept quietly in the corner of the carriage. Beside her lay her
carpet bag and a brown shawl. On her lap was an orange, and she held a
crumpled paper bag of biscuits in her hand. There was nothing unusual
about her. She was just one instance of heartbreak, the heart-break of a
whole nation which loves home as no other people have ever loved it, and
yet are doomed, as it seems inevitably, to leave it. She was just one
more waif thrown into the whirlpool of the great world to toil and
struggle, succeed barrenly or pitifully fail; but through it all,
through even the possible loss of faith and ultimate degradation, fated
to cling to a love for the gray desolate fatherland. The other girl
was different. Hyacinth looked at her with intense interest. She was the
older of the two, and not so pretty as her sister. Her face was thin and
pale, and a broad scar under one ear showed where a surgeon's knife had
cut. She sat with her hands folded on her lap, gazing dry-eyed out of
the window beside her. There was no sign of sorrow on her face, nothing
but a kind of sulky defiance.

After a while she took the paper bag out of her sister's hand, opened
it, and began to eat the gingerbread biscuits it contained. Hyacin