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Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees more slowly than might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not prospered in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle.
This was one of the very few harsh sayings that Theresa Joyce has uttered in the course of her long life, and it came like a shock upon her hearers. Mrs. Joyce at last said blankly: "What at all has took the child?" And Bessie Kilfoyle said to Denis, who stood dumbfounded: "But indeed now, you may be sure there's not a many up here, at any rate, who do that."
"And what talk have you out of you about waterasks? You're the great man, bedad." "Me aunt's lookin' in on Mrs. Kilfoyle, ma'am," said Ody, "be raison of Brian bein' off to the Town. And right enough you and me knows what's took him there; and so does Norah Finegan. Och, good luck to the pair of thim." "Coortin'," said his aunt, who preferred to put things briefly and clearly.
Therefore to Christy Sheridan and Terence Kilfoyle, with half a dozen of their neighbours, the sight of their distinguished visitor was an oasis in a very arid desert, and they made towards it thirstily.
Kilfoyle heroically hustled her Thady into the house as she saw him on the brink of beginning loudly to relate his encounter with the strange man, and desired him to whisht and stay where he was in a manner so sternly repressive that he actually remained there as if he had been a pebble dropped into a pool, and not, as usual, a cork to bob up again immediately. Then Mrs.
"When I seen her a while back, she was out there wid the childer, discoorsin' to Terence Kilfoyle," Andy said contentedly. "Musha, good gracious, Terence Kilfoyle, and what's he come after?" she said in a bitter tone. "He stepped up wid a couple of pounds of fresh butter and a dozen of eggs.
Hence his contemporary, old Paddy Ryan, had prodded little round craters in the snow with his thick stick all along the good step of bleak road which lay between his house and the forge, and with him had come on the same errand Terence Kilfoyle, who, although of so much junior standing, was esteemed as a man of notably shrewd sense and judgment.
Little Thady Kilfoyle reported that he had met the strange man a bit down the road, "leggin' it along at a great rate, wid a black rowl of somethin' under his arm that he looked to be crumplin' up as small as he could" the word "crumpling" went acutely to Mrs.
Meanwhile Theresa Joyce, who was likewise bedrenched and weary, found a seat in the opposite corner, where her nearest neighbours were Ody Rafferty, and her niece-in-law, Mrs. Brian Kilfoyle, with her daughter Rose.
Even before the memorable summer evening when the gaunt old man in the curious big hat had asked for the night's lodging, which lengthened into a season's sojourn, he had often wandered among visions of places where there were as many books as anybody could read a dozen maybe and some people in it with a power of book-learning as much perhaps as his Reverence or the Doctor only neither priest nor quality, but just neighbours whom he could question about anything that came into his head, as he used to question his grandfather, and Paddy Ryan, and Terence Kilfoyle, until he got tired of being asked, in reply: "Musha good gracious, and who could be tellin' you that?" an answer which had repeatedly left him a discouraged atom of bewilderment, symbolically environed by our wide-spreading bog.
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