ng prize I'm seeking now, and that's your promise that
you'll wed me in a fortnight, when our banns is called.

PEGEEN -- [backing away from him.] -- You've right daring to go ask
me that, when all knows you'll be starting to some girl in your own
townland, when your father's rotten in four months, or five.

CHRISTY -- [indignantly.] Starting from you, is it? (He follows her.)
I will not, then, and when the airs is warming in four months, or five,
it's then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night,
the times sweet smells do be rising, and you'd see a little shiny new
moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.

PEGEEN [looking at him playfully.] -- And it's that kind of a poacher's
love you'd make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night
is down?

CHRISTY. It's little you'll think if my love's a poacher's, or an
earl's itself, when you'll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I
squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I'd feel a kind of pity for
the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in his golden chair.

PEGEEN. That'll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her
heart out before she'd meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or
talk, at all.

CHRISTY -- [encouraged.] Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we're
astray in Erris, when Good Friday's by, drinking a sup from a well,
and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap
or sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the
flowers of the earth.

PEGEEN -- [in a lower voice, moved by his tone.] -- I'd be nice so, is
it?

CHRISTY -- [with rapture.] -- If the mitred bishops seen you that time,
they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining
the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she
abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.

PEGEEN -- [with real tenderness.] -- And what is it I have, Christy
Mahon, to make me fitting entertainment for the like of you, that has
such poet's talking, and such bravery of heart?

CHRISTY -- [in a low voice.] -- Isn't there the light of seven heavens
in your heart alone, the way you'll be an angel's lamp to me from this
out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen, or the
Carrowmore?

PEGEEN. If I was your wife, I'd be along with you those nights, Christy
Mahon, the way you'd see I was a great hand at coaxing bailiffs, or
coining funny nick-na