"Are you not going to bring home a wife to the old house, my son?" said his foster-mother, an old woman who had lived with him all her life. "Before I die I'd love to dandle a child of yours upon my knee." But Dermot only shook his head. "My wife, I fear, will be hard to win. I may have to wait for her all my days." And then, after a little while, when the old woman still went on talking to him, "How can I marry when my love has been asleep these three hundred years?" This was the first time that he had spoken about Eileen for many a day, and the old nurse had thought, like everybody else, that he had forgotten that old legend and all the foolish fancies of his youth. She was sitting at her spinning-wheel, but she dropped the thread and folded her hands sadly on her knees. "My son, why think on her that's as good as dead? Even if you could win her, would you take a bewitched maiden to be your wife?" It was a summer's day, and Dermot stood looking far away through the sunshine toward where, though he could not see it, the enchanted castle lay. He had stood in that same place a thousand times, looking toward it, dreaming over the old tale. For several minutes he made no answer to what the old woman had said; then all at once he turned round to her. "Nurse," he said passionately, "I have adored her for twenty years. Ever since I first stood at your knees, and you told me of her, she has been the one love of my heart. Unless I can marry her, I will never marry any woman in this world." He came to the old woman's side, and though he was a full-grown man, he put his arms about her neck. "Nurse, you have a keen woman's wit; cannot you help me with it?" he said. "I have wandered round the lough by day and night and challenged the magician to come and try his power against me, but he does not hear me, or he will not come. How can I reach him through those dark, cruel waters and force him to come out of them and fight with me?" "Foolish lad!" the old woman said. She was a wise old woman, but she believed as much as everybody else did in the legend of the castle in the lough. "What has he to gain that he need come up and fight with you? Do you think the black cat's such a fool as to heed your ranting and your challenging?" "But what else can I do?" The old woman took her thread into her hands again, and sat spinning for two or three minutes without answering a word. She was a sensible old woman, and it seemed to her a sad pity that a fine young man like her foster-son should waste his life in pining for the love of a maiden who had lain asleep and enchanted for three hundred years. Yet the nurse loved him so dearly that she could not bear to cross him in anything, or to refuse to do anything that he asked. So she sat spinning and thinking for a little while, and then said: