to come and
inspect a pair of marketable chickens, in anticipation of which Mrs.
M'Gurk had wetted a cup of tea and used up her last handful of wholemeal
for a cake, that Mrs. Dooley, who was in rather affluent circumstances,
might not think them "too poorly off altogether." But, after all, the
hours had slipped blankly by, and nobody had arrived. So the widow had
ruefully put her teapot to sit on the hob until himself came in--for,
properly speaking, she was at this time not yet a widow--and had stepped
down her tussocky slope with her double disappointment to Mrs. Kilfoyle.

Mrs. Kilfoyle was knitting at her door and not looking out over the bog,
where the flushed light of the sunset drowsed on the black sod in an
almost tangible fire-film. Against it the poppies stood up dark and
opaque, but the large white daisies had caught the wraith of the glow on
their glimmering discs. She had been thinking how not so long ago her
son Thady used to come whistling home to her across the bog when the
shadows stretched their longest. The sunset still came punctually every
evening, but had grown wonderfully lonesome since the kick of a
cross-tempered cart-horse had silenced his whistling and stopped his
home-coming for ever. Thady's whistling had been indifferent, considered
as music, yet it had sounded pleasant in her ears, and Mrs. M'Gurk's
trouble seemed to her not very serious. However, she replied to her
complaint: "Ah, sure, woman dear, like enough she might be here
to-morra."

"And if she is, she'll be very apt to not get e'er a chuck or a chucken
off of me--not the feather of a one," said Mrs. M'Gurk, resentfully,
"plenty of other things I have to do besides wastin' me time waitin' for
people that don't know their own minds from one minyit to the next, and
makin' a fool of meself star-gazin' along the road, and ne'er a fut
stirrin' on it no more than if it was desolit wildernesses."

She would not for the world have alluded to her expenditure of more
material resources, and accordingly had to explain her vexation by
putting a fictitious value upon her time, which, in reality, was just
then drearily superabundant.

"Sure," suggested Mrs. Kilfoyle, "the poor woman maybe was kep' at home
some way, and she wid ivery intintion to be comin'. I declare, now,
you'd whiles think things knew what you was manin' in your mind, and riz
themselves up agin it a' purpose to prevint you, they happen that
conthrary."

As Mrs. M'Gurk's