That part of the country was quiet enough. But elsewhere there were raidings of houses, attacks on police barracks, shootings, woundings, murders; and afterwards arrests, imprisonments, and swift, wild vengeance taken. Mary was afraid of what the man from Dublin might want. Denis turned to her, and she could see that he was frightened too. “Mary, Mary!” he said. “Whatever comes or goes, there’ll be no harm done to you or yours!” She loosed her hold on his arm and turned from him with a sigh. “I must be going from you now, Denis,” she said, “Mother will be looking for me, and the dear God knows what she’d say if she knew I’d been here talking to you.” Mrs. Drennan knew very well where her daughter had been. She spoke her mind plainly when Mary entered the farm kitchen. “I’ll not have you talking or walking with Denis Ryan,” she said; “nor your father won’t have it! Everybody knows what he is, and what his friends are. There’s nothing too bad for those fellows to do, and no daughter of mine will mix herself up with them!” “Denis isn’t doing anything wrong, mother,” said Mary. “And if he thinks Ireland ought to be a free republic, hasn’t he as good a right to his own opinion as you or me, or my father either?” “No man has a right to be shooting and murdering innocent people, whether they’re policemen or whatever they are. And that’s what Denis Ryan and the rest of them are at, day and night, all over the country. And if they’re not doing it here yet, they soon will. Blackguards, I call them, and the sooner they’re hanged the better, every one of them!” In Flaherty’s barn that night the gentleman from Dublin spoke to an audience of some twenty or thirty young men. He spoke with passion and conviction. He told again the thousand times repeated story of the wrongs which Ireland has suffered at the hands of the English in old, old days. He told of more recent happenings, of men arrested and imprisoned without trial, without even definite accusation, of intolerable infringements of the common rights. He spoke of the glorious hope of national liberty, of Ireland as a free Republic. The men he spoke too, young men all of them, listened with flashing eyes, with clenched teeth, and faces moist with emotion. They responded to his words with sudden growings and curses. The speaker went on to tell of the deeds of men elsewhere in Ireland. “The soldiers of the Irish Republic,” so he called them. They had attacked the armed forces of English rule. They had stormed police barracks. They had taken arms and ammunitions where such things were to be found. These, he said, were glorious deeds wrought by men everywhere in Ireland. “But what have you done here?” he asked. “And what do you mean to do?” Michael Murnihan spoke next. He said that he was ashamed of the men around him and of the club to which he belonged.