your road, so to spake, like the sun racin' the shadows
on a windy day. 'Deed now, I'd be goin' along wid you to hear what
they'll say to it, but I'm ould you see, and ivery step I've thramped I
have the feel of in ivery bone of me body; so I'll stop this night up at
Brian's."

"And bedad, ma'am, it's well off you are, if you've the feel of nothin'
worse in them," said the querulous voice of old Peter Sheridan, whose
acquaintances describe him as being "terrible gathered up with the
rheumatism this great while," so great, in fact, that everybody except
himself has by this time become accustomed to his condition.

For the most part, however, they were rather pleased faces that watched
the three strangers out of sight, the last long beams from the sunset
making blink the eyes of nearly all Lisconnel. The west dispread its
fiery golden bloom wider every moment as the swelling scarlet disc
wheeled lower, burning with orbed flame a hollow path through the
kindled haze. One laggard cloud, a great, soft nest of snow, drifted
into the heart of it, and out of it again, flushed and glistering, and
sailed on, a radiant shape, to meet and eclipse the misty white
ghost-moon, faint and dim in the east. Far away over the level bog the
light was stealing about in streams like water spilt on a floor.

"Well now, I declare," said Mrs. Brian, "it does one's heart good to see
a bit of luck like that happenin' to a body."

"Ay, does it," said Judy Ryan, "the crathur to be gettin' back her sight
just in the right minyit of time to see her son comin' home to her. Sure
now one might take a plisure in plannin' such a thing, if one had the
managin' of them."

"Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for
us then," said Mrs. Quigley.

"Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from," suggested Brian
Kilfoyle, hopefully.

"It's apt to stay there, then," quoth Mrs. Quigley, "for any signs I can
see."

"Ay, ma'am, that's me own notion," said Peter Sheridan, bitterly; "I'm
thinkin' we'll have to be goin' there, wheriver it is, and lookin' after
it for ourselves, if it's good luck we're a-wantin'."

"And I dunno what better we could be doin'," said Theresa Joyce, "than
goin' where it is, when we get the chance. Ah, there's the last of the
sun," she said, as a quivering red shaft shot up suddenly, and trembled
away into nothing on the air. "Ay, for sure, he goes down a great way
off out on the bog; the crathur