Without troubling to put on a hat or to take off her working apron, Lady Corless got on her bicycle and rode down to her father’s forge. She had in her pocket the newspaper which contained the important paragraph. Old Malone laid aside a cart-wheel to which he was fitting a new rim and followed his daughter into the house. He was much better educated than she was and had been for many years a keen and active politician. He took in the meaning of the paragraph at once. “Gosh!” he said. “If that’s true--and I’m not saying it is true; but, if it is, it’s the best yet. It’s what’s been wanted in Ireland this long time.” He read the paragraph through again, slowly and carefully. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, “didn’t I tell everyone when the election was on, that the Sinn Feiners was the lads to do the trick for us? Didn’t I say that without we’d get a republic in Ireland the country would do no good? And there’s the proof of it.” He slapped the paper heartily with his hand. To Lady Corless, whose mind was working rapidly, his reasoning seemed a little inconclusive. It even struck her that an Irish republic, had such a thing really come into being, might not have been able to offer the citizens the glorious chance of a weekly pension of twenty-five shillings. But she was aware that politics is a complex business in which she was not trained. She said nothing. Her father explained his line of thought. “If them fellows over in England,” he said, “weren’t terrible frightened of the Sinn Feiners, would they be offering us the likes of that to keep us quiet? Bedamn, but they would not. Nobody ever got a penny out of an Englishman yet, without he’d frightened him first. And it’s the Sinn Feiners done that. There’s the why and the wherefore of it to you. Twenty-five shillings a week! It ought to be thirty shillings, so it ought. But sure, twenty-five shillings is something, and I’d be in favour of taking it, so I would. Let the people of Ireland take it, I say, as an instalment of what’s due to them, and what they’ll get in the latter end, please God!” “Can you make out how a man’s to get it?” said Lady Corless. “Man!” said old Malone. “Man! No, but man and woman. There isn’t a girl in the country, let alone a boy, but what’s entitled to it, and I’d like to see the police or anyone else interfering with them getting it.” “Will it be paid out of the post office like the Old Age Pensions?” said Lady Corless. “I don’t know will it,” said her father, “but that way or some other way it’s bound to be paid, and all anyone has to do is to go over to what they call the Labour Exchange, at Dunbeg, and say there’s no work for him where he lives. Then he’ll get the money. It’s what the young fellow in that office is there for, is to give the money, and by damn if he doesn’t do it there’ll be more heard about the matter!”