, and drawin' grand pay, and
the colonel in his rigimint ready to do a turn for him any time, and a
rael steady kind-hearted lad to the back of that. But sure he's after as
nice a little girl as he'd ha' found anywheres, wid all his thravellin',
and as good as gould. He'll be very apt to be spakin' out to her
prisintly, for it's gettin' near his lave's ind, and what for would they
be waitin'? But to my mind it's as good as made up after what he's done
to-day."

In a little while after this Ody Rafferty's aunt slipped away, and set
off hobbling along the road towards Duffclane. She wanted to intercept
her grand-nephew on his way home and tell him this news. For all day she
had been haunted by an apprehension that Ody meant to return with a
fairing for Theresa, the presentation of which might bring about a
crisis in his courtship very disastrous from her own point of view. Old
Moggy surveyed her world rather steadily at all times from that
particular outlook, finding in her solitary superfluousness little to
deflect her gaze. The disappointment which, on her own theory, these
tidings would bring to Ody did not do so now, and she put her best foot
foremost, animated by the pleasure of telling some new thing, one,
moreover, that threw a reassuring light upon her situation. With even
her amended opinion of the lad she could hardly imagine that he would
have a chance against magnificent Denis O'Meara, whom nobody would have
ever expected to look for a wife in poor little Lisconnel--but you never
could tell, and she felt that it still behoved her to be on her guard
against all possible perils. Therefore she at present thought it
expedient to waylay Ody, and let him know that if he had any notion of
Theresa Joyce, he was a day after the fair.

Hobbling on bent and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with
her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams,
she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent
and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a
feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude;
and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the
withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just in the
nick of time, she said to herself, when she saw the trio presently
coming over the top of the hill. Ody was pointing out conciliatingly to
the morose Rory how they'd be at home now nearly in the time he'd