it 'ud be givin' them if he wint back to the rigimint wid his
eyes slashed out of his head, as much as to say he hadn't a fair chance
among us unless he'd come wid his side-arms."

The neighbours were of opinion, too, that "it was no wonder little
Theresa Joyce had got a bit moped and quiet, after her sweetheart bein'
as good as destroyed before her eyes, and it hard to say if she'd ever
see a sight of him again."

"It was a misfort'nit thing," Mrs. Con Ryan remarked one day, when the
subject was under discussion, "that young O'Meara hadn't actually spoke
out before it happint thim. 'Twould ha' made her a dale aisier in her
mind now, I wouldn't won'er. Because the way the matter stands, he
might take up wid some diff'rint notion, and just be off wid himself
like a cloud blown out of the sky, and she couldn't be sayin' a word, if
she was ever so sure of what he was intindin'."

Young Mrs. Keogh, to whom she made the observation, refused to entertain
this view, and replied, "Sorra a fear is there of that. It was aisy to
see he'd ha' gone to the Well of the World's End after her, let alone
steppin' up from the Town, if he's spared to get his health. Ay, he'll
be comin' back for her one of these fine days, sure enough, plase God."

But the fulfilment of her confident prediction looked several degrees
more doubtful in the light of one of the two pieces of news which Mrs.
Carbery, accompanied by her daughter Rose, conveyed to the Joyces' on a
bright September morning a short while after. Her son had come home with
it from the Town too late the night before. One of them was that Hugh
McInerney, who had been awaiting the assizes in Moynalone Jail, had died
of the fever there on last Friday. There was nothing very surprising in
this event, as Hugh's open-air life could have but ill acclimatised him
to the atmosphere of the unclean little jail; and it was not likely to
be very deeply deplored at Lisconnel, where he had not been known long,
nor, as we have seen, much to his advantage.

As Mrs. Carbery sat in the three-cornered arm-chair, with the sun-dazzle
off a burnished mug on the dresser shimmering into her eyes, and making
her blink quaintly, she said, with rather severe solemnity, that "she
hoped the young fellow had had time to repint of his sins, or else it
was very apt to be a bad look-out for him, and he after comin' widin a
shavin' of takin' another man's life no time at all ago, so to
spake--ne'er a chance but it w