."

In came the goodwife with even greater signs of trouble than her
husband, but all in a flurry of good-humoured welcome. They sat, the
pair of them, before me in a little room poorly lit by a narrow window
but half-glazed, because a lower portion of it had been destroyed in
the occupation of the Irish, and had to be timbered up to keep the wind
outside. A douce pathetic pair; I let my thoughts stray a little even
from their daughter as I looked on them, and pondered on the tragedy of
age that is almost as cruel as war, but for the love that set Provost
Brown with his chair haffit close against his wife's, so that less
noticeably he might take her hand in his below the table and renew the
glow that first they learned, no doubt, when lad and lass awandering in
summer days, oh long ago, in Eas-a-chosain glen.

They plied me with a hundred questions, of my adventures, and of my
father, and of affairs up in Shira Glen. I sat answering very often at
hazard, with my mind fixed on the one question I had to ask, which was a
simple one as to the whereabouts and condition of their daughter. But I
leave to any lad of a shrinking and sensitive nature if this was not a
task of exceeding difficulty. For you must remember that here were two
very sharp-eyed parents, one of them with a gift of irony discomposing
to a lover, and the other or both perhaps, with no reason, so far as
I knew, to think I had any special feeling for the girl. But I knew as
well as if I had gone over the thing a score of times before, how my
manner of putting that simple question would reveal me at a flash to the
irony of the father and the wonder of the mother. And in any case they
gave me not the smallest chance of putting it As they plied me with
affairs a thousand miles beyond the limits of my immediate interest, and
I answered them with a brevity almost discourteous, I was practising two
or three phrases in my mind.

"And how is your daughter, sir?" might seem simple enough, but it would
be too cold for an inquirer to whom hitherto she had always been
Betty; while to ask for Betty outright would--a startling new spring of
delicacy in my nature told me--be to use a friendly warmth only the most
cordial relations with the girl would warrant No matter how I mooted the
lady, I knew something in my voice and the very flush in my face would
reveal my secret My position grew more pitiful every moment, for to
the charge of cowardice I levelled first at myself