ud happen to her? Hurry in
now, Corny. Come, Mr Broadbent. I left the tea on the hob to
draw; and it'll be black if we don't go in an drink it.

They go up the hill. It is dark by this time.

Broadbent does not fare so badly after all at Aunt Judy's board.
He gets not only tea and bread-and-butter, but more mutton chops
than he has ever conceived it possible to eat at one sitting.
There is also a most filling substance called potato cake. Hardly
have his fears of being starved been replaced by his first
misgiving that he is eating too much and will be sorry for it
tomorrow, when his appetite is revived by the production of a
bottle of illicitly distilled whisky, called pocheen, which he
has read and dreamed of [he calls it pottine] and is now at last
to taste. His good humor rises almost to excitement before
Cornelius shows signs of sleepiness. The contrast between Aunt
Judy's table service and that of the south and east coast hotels
at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London,
seems to him delightfully Irish. The almost total atrophy of any
sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or
toleration of the possibility of life being something better than
a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine
mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes with
his guest as the whimsical affectation of a shrewd Irish humorist
and incorrigible spendthrift. Aunt Judy seems to him an incarnate
joke. The likelihood that the joke will pall after a month or so,
and is probably not apparent at any time to born Rossculleners,
or that he himself unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his
fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations, does
not occur to him for a moment. In the end he is so charmed, and
so loth to go to bed and perhaps dream of prosaic England, that
he insists on going out to smoke a cigar and look for Nora Reilly
at the Round Tower. Not that any special insistence is needed;
for the English inhibitive instinct does not seem to exist in
Rosscullen. Just as Nora's liking to miss a meal and stay out at
the Round Tower is accepted as a sufficient reason for her doing
it, and for the family going to bed and leaving the door open for
her, so Broadbent's whim to go out for a late stroll provokes
neither hospitable remonstrance nor surprise. Indeed Aunt Judy
wants to get rid of him whilst she makes a bed for him on the
sofa. So off he goes, full fed, happ