Paddy and Mick discoursed for a good while in this strain about the dignities and amenities of a military life, and Mrs. Doherty had not much to say on the subject. During the conversation, however, she continued to rinse one of her aprons, and wring it dry very carefully, and drop it back into the water, like a machine slightly out of gear, which goes on repeating some process ineffectually. The two friends read in her silence an omen of acquiescent conviction, and congratulated each other upon it with furtive nods and winks. Mick went off to the bog in high feather, believing that the interview had been a great success, and that his mother was, as Paddy put it, “comin’ round to the notion gradual, like an ould goat grazin’ round its tetherin’ stump.” His hopes, indeed, were so completely in the ascendant that he summed up his most serious uneasiness when he said to himself: “She’ll do right enough, no fear, or I’d niver think of it, if Thady was just somethin’ steadier. But sure he might happen to git a thrifle more wit yet; he’s no great age to spake of.” But when he came home about sunsetting, his mother was feeding her few hens outside their cabin, the end one of a mossy-roofed row, with its door turned at right angles to the others, looking out across the purple brown of the bog-land to the far-off hills, faint, like a blue mist with a waved pattern in it, against the horizon. Mick, brought up short by the group, woke out of his walking dream, in which he had been performing acts of valour to the tune of the “Soldier’s Chorus” in Gounod’s Faust, the last thing the band had played yesterday; and he noticed a diminution in the select circle of fowls, who crooned and crawked and pecked round the broken dish of scraps. “I see the specklety pullet’s after strayin’ on you agin,” he said; “herself’s the conthrary little bein’; I must take a look about for her prisintly.” “Ah, sure she’s sold,” said his mother; “it’s too many I had altogether. I was torminted thryin’ to git feedin’ for them. So I sold her this mornin’ to Mrs. Dunne at Loughmore, that gave me a fine price for her. ’Deed she’d have took her off of me this while back, on’y I’d just a sort of notion agin’ partin’ from the crathur. But be comin’ in to your supper, child alive; it’s ready waitin’ this good while. Molly’s below at her sister’s, and I dunno were Thady’s off to, so there’s on’y you and me in it to-night.”