e
Ballymena Road.

"I suppose I'll have to give in to you," she said. "You're a terrible
fella for coaxin'!"

She moved towards the trap where the head of the ladder showed, and
prepared to descend from the loft.

"What time will I come for you?" he asked, following her.

"Half-seven," she answered, going down the ladder. "I'll be well done my
work then!"

He stood above her, looking down through the trap. "We generally have
dinner at half-past seven," he said.

"You should have your dinner in the middle of the day, like us," she
answered, and added, decisively, "It's half-seven or never!"

"All right," he exclaimed, stooping down carefully and putting his feet
on a rung of the ladder. "I'll come for you then. I'll manage it
somehow."

4

He told his father that he did not want any dinner. John Marsh had
enquired about his headache, and Henry had said that it was better, but
that he thought he would like to be quiet that evening. He said, too,
that he had made up his mind to go for a long, lonely walk. "But what
about your dinner?" Mr. Quinn had said, and he had answered that he did
not want any. "If I'm hungry," he added, "I can have something before I
go to bed."

He felt vaguely irritated with John Marsh who first pestered him ...
that was the word Henry used in his mind ... with sympathy and then
lamented that his headache would prevent him from helping that evening
at the Gaelic language class. "Still, I suppose well manage," he ended
regretfully.

"I don't suppose there'll be many at the class," Henry replied almost
sneeringly.

"Why?" said Marsh.

"Oh, well," Henry went on, "after last night!..."

"You mean that they think more of dancing than they do of the language?"
Marsh interrupted, and there was so much of anxiety in the tone of his
voice that Henry regretted that he had sneered at him.

"Well, that's natural," he said, trying to think of some phrase that
would mitigate the unkindness of what he was saying, and failing to
think of it. "After all, it _is_ much more fun to dance than to learn
grammar...."

"But this is the _Irish_ language," Marsh persisted, as if the Irishness
of the tongue transcended the drudgery of learning grammar.

Mr. Quinn crumpled the _Northern Whig_ and threw it at Marsh's head.
"You an' your oul' language!" he exclaimed. "What good'll it do anybody
but a lot of professors. Here's the world tryin' to get Latin an' Greek
out of the universities, an' here's