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He buckled on the pipes, set the bellows under one arm, and the bag under the other, worked them both as knowingly as if he had been twenty years at the business, and lilted up 'Sheela na guira' in the finest style imaginable. All were in astonishment: the poor woman crossed herself.
He heard a woman's cheerful voice cry out a conventional "good-bye, good-bye," and through the window he saw the flutter of a dainty handkerchief. A truck was wheeled past the waiting-room. There was the crack of a whip and some cars rattled away over the road. Then there was silence. Sheela Dempsey walked over to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.
The waiting-room was so bare, so cold, so grey, so like a sepulchre. What could Sheela Dempsey with all her womanly understanding, with all her quick intuition, know of the things that happened beside her? How could she have ears for the crashing down of the pillars of the building that Martin Cosgrave had raised up in his soul?
For this is the hour when Sheela brews the tea, and the knights and the ladies quaff it from our golden cups; and truly I am weary of this quest, and far rather would I be there than here."
And the hours ran on; and Sheela the Scribe brewed and brewed and brewed and brewed the tea at her table in the Peacock Walk, and the knights and ladies quaffed it from the golden cups belonging to the Wise Woman of Wales; but Finola the Festive and Pearla the Melodious lingered in the labyrinth with Loskenn of the Bare Knees and the Bishop of Ossory.
Sheela Dempsey looked up into the face of Martin Cosgrave and saw there what she had half-dreaded to see. "Martin," she said, "Rose is not coming home." Martin Cosgrave gripped the door of the waiting-room. The train whistled outside and glided from the station.
It was while Martin Cosgrave walked through the building that Ellen Miscal came to him with the second letter from America. The carpenter was hammering at something below. The letter said that Rose Dempsey and her sister, Sheela, would be home in the late harvest. "With all I saw since I left Kilbeg," Rose Dempsey wrote, "I never saw one that I thought as much of as Martin Cosgrave."
The king also told Sheela the Scribe, secretly, that one of his knights had found a money-piece and a breviary in the forest of Rosnaree; and the silver was unlike any ever used in the country of the Dedannans, and the breviary could belong only to a pious Gael known as Loskenn of the Bare Knees.
Now Sheela the Scribe, having fasted from midnight until dawn, gazed upon the Horn of Foreknowledge, and read there that it was wiser for her to remain on guard at the Fairy Palace, while her sisters explored the secret fastnesses of the labyrinth.
Nevertheless, when Finola the Festive went forth to the chase one day, she found a quicken berry glowing like a ruby in the highroad, and Sheela plucked a second from under a gnarled thorn on the Slope of the Chariots, and Pearla discovered a third in the curiously-compounded, swiftly-satisfying loaf of Toma.
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