Part 19 (2/2)

”And bedad, ma'am, it's well off you are, if you've the feel of nothin'

worse in them,” said the querulous voice of old Peter Sheridan, whose acquaintances describe him as being ”terrible gathered up with the rheumatism this great while,” so great, in fact, that everybody except himself has by this time become accustomed to his condition.

For the most part, however, they were rather pleased faces that watched the three strangers out of sight, the last long beams from the sunset making blink the eyes of nearly all Lisconnel. The west dispread its fiery golden bloom wider every moment as the swelling scarlet disc wheeled lower, burning with orbed flame a hollow path through the kindled haze. One laggard cloud, a great, soft nest of snow, drifted into the heart of it, and out of it again, flushed and glistering, and sailed on, a radiant shape, to meet and eclipse the misty white ghost-moon, faint and dim in the east. Far away over the level bog the light was stealing about in streams like water spilt on a floor.

”Well now, I declare,” said Mrs. Brian, ”it does one's heart good to see a bit of luck like that happenin' to a body.”

”Ay, does it,” said Judy Ryan, ”the crathur to be gettin' back her sight just in the right minyit of time to see her son comin' home to her. Sure now one might take a plisure in plannin' such a thing, if one had the managin' of them.”

”Ah, dear, but I wish somebody 'ud be conthrivin' a bit of good luck for us then,” said Mrs. Quigley.

”Maybe there's plinty more where that's comin' from,” suggested Brian Kilfoyle, hopefully.

”It's apt to stay there, then,” quoth Mrs. Quigley, ”for any signs I can see.”

”Ay, ma'am, that's me own notion,” said Peter Sheridan, bitterly; ”I'm thinkin' we'll have to be goin' there, wheriver it is, and lookin' after it for ourselves, if it's good luck we're a-wantin'.”

”And I dunno what better we could be doin',” said Theresa Joyce, ”than goin' where it is, when we get the chance. Ah, there's the last of the sun,” she said, as a quivering red shaft shot up suddenly, and trembled away into nothing on the air. ”Ay, for sure, he goes down a great way off out on the bog; the crathur 'ud ha' been plased to see it. 'Deed no, I dunno anythin' better we could be doin' than goin' after our good luck.”

So all through that gathering twilight Mrs. Morrough and her two sons were journeying away with their high fortune to Laraghmena. They were still on the road long after the clear moon had filled the air with s.h.i.+mmering silver, and sent their shadows stretching darkly far over the frosted gra.s.s. But Lisconnel had gone to seek, for the time being, its good luck in the land of dreams.

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