back again
on leave.

So, although Mrs. Joyce may have drawn wrong inferences, the results
were much as she had foreseen. Theresa never married, and when her
mother died she went to live with her brother Mick at Laraghmena, where
she is living still, notwithstanding that it is so long since all this
happened--since the fine summer when Denis O'Meara was at Lisconnel, and
Hugh McInerney, who luckily left nobody to be breaking their hearts
fretting after him, died in Moynalone Jail.

The yellow ribbon lies safely in her box, and with it a grimy bit of
paper, brought to her one day by a trusty hand, to which Hugh found out
a way of committing it "before he was took bad entirely." Theresa
herself has never deciphered its wild scrawls, being an unlettered
person, but its bearer read it over to her until she knew it by heart
every word. "For your own self the yella ribin is," the letter ran, "but
don't be wearin' it unless you like it. And I'm sorry the man got hit;
but I do be dhramin' most nights that it's you I'm after rapin' the
little black head off of; and I'd liefer lose me life than think I'd be
after hurtin' a hair of it. But the Divil was busy wid me that evenin'.
And I'm very apt never to get the chance to set fut again out on the big
bog. It 'ud do me heart good to see the sun goin' down in it a great way
off, for this is a quare small place. It's a long while. But sure, to
the end of all the days of me life," it said to her, like an echo
beaten back from the walls of the great abysm, "it's of yourself I'll be
thinkin' off away in contintmint at Lisconnel."

CHAPTER VII

MR. POLYMATHERS

It was to an accidental circumstance that Lisconnel owed the prolonged
sojourn there of perhaps the most distinguished scholar who has ever
visited us. For when he arrived at O'Beirne's forge one misty June
evening, the night's lodging only was all he asked or desired. But in
those times, now some fifty years since, we had "a terrible dale of
sickness about in the country," and next morning the stranger was down
with the fever, which, although so mild a case that even Bridget
O'Beirne never gave him over more than twice in the same day, brought
his journey perforce to a halt. At the beginning he was very loth to
believe that he must relinquish his intention of reaching Dublin by a
certain date--the first Monday in July; however, having once recognised
the impossibility of doing so, he showed no haste to quit his qua