One night in August the impulse seized her to put on the white dress
that she had worn in Dublin. When dinner was over she left Jocelyn
snoring over his port and walked as though she were dreaming down the
Clonderriff road. The air was full of pale grass-moths. Her heart
fluttered within her: she couldn't think why. She herself was like a
white, fluttering moth. She came quickly to the outskirts of the
village. The cabins were asleep. In none of them could as much as a
candlelight be seen. It was strange that the village should be deader
than Roscarna, and she felt as though a sudden and deeper darkness had
descended on her. A little frightened she decided that she would go
through to the end of the village and pay a visit to Considine: not
because she wanted to see him in the least, but because she loved
shocking him, and nothing surely could shock him more at this time of
night than the moth-like apparition that she presented. She even felt
a wayward curiosity to know what he did with himself at night. For
several years there had been whispers of a theological thesis that he
was writing for his doctor's degree. She imagined him, with a reading
lamp and red eyes, up to his ears in the minor prophets. It would be
fun to see what he thought of her.

She hurried on through the silent village, but when she came to an
isolated cabin at the end of it she heard a sound that explained the
desolation of the rest; a noise of terrible and unearthly wailing. In
the darkness of this curious night it seemed to her a very awful thing.
She guessed that somebody had died in the last cabin, and that a wake
was being held. For a moment she hesitated, and then, as curiosity got
the better of her horror, she came gradually nearer.

The women were keening somewhere at the back of the house, but the
front windows blazed with the light of many candles, and the door of
the cabin was wide open. Inside its narrow compass a crowd of
villagers, twenty or thirty of both sexes, was gathered. Gabrielle,
clutching at the wall, drew nearer and looked inside.

The room was full of bottles, a thicket of empty bottles stood on the
table, the press, and in the corner by the fireplace. The floor was
strewn with the figures of men and women who had drunk until they
dropped. Those who were still awake, and reasonably sober, were
playing a kind of round game, passing from hand to hand a stick, the
end of which had been lighted in the fire