“Look here, Katie,” he called out suddenly, reaching out his right hand impotently towards the corner off the lane, around which she had swept. Then he put his hand back into his pocket and gripped the tight wad of Treasury notes. He wanted now to give her some money. She had been good to him. He began to walk up the lane slowly. There was no need to hurry. He knew where to find her. He must not let her go like that. But he had not gone ten yards before he halted again. He turned about and walked back quickly into the main road. He had suddenly remembered a terrifying thing. Supposing somebody were to come into Biddy Burke’s and say that Frank McPhillip had been killed owing to information being given to the police? They were sure to say that. They would see him there with money in his pocket. They would suspect. . . . He turned to the right, past the corner of the main road. He went twenty yards down the street and then brought his two feet together like a soldier coming to a halt on parade. He wheeled inwards, still in the same mechanical manner, towards a shop window. He stood at ease, clasping his hands behind his back in military manner. Somehow, it gave peace to his distracted thoughts, as if he had suddenly given over the responsibility of his thoughts and actions to an imaginary superior officer. Into his resting mind pleasant memories came, distant pleasant memories like day-dreams on a summer day, dreamt on the banks of a rock-strewn river, among the flowering heather. They were memories of his youth. They came to him in a strange bewildered manner, as if afraid of the dark, ferocious mind into which they came. Gypo stared at them fiercely, with bulging lips, as if they were enemies taunting him. Then gradually he softened towards them. Then a mad longing seized him for the protection of the environment of his youth, the country-side of a Tipperary village, the little farm, the big red-faced healthy peasant who was his father, his long-faced kind-hearted mother, who hoped that he would become a priest. He wrinkled up his face and looked at his youth intently. He stiffened himself, as if he were about to hurl himself by sheer force back through the intervening years, of sin and sorrow and misery, to the peace and gentleness and monotony of life, in that little village at the foot of the Galtees. Various, intimate, foolish, little recollections crowded into his mind. He remembered goats, asses’ foals, rocks in a mountain torrent, a saying of the village smith, a glance from a girl, his first drink of wine stolen in the sacristy of the parish church while he was serving Mass. Thousands of memories came and went rapidly. They passed like soldiers before a saluting-point, some gay, some sad, some dim, some distinct and almost articulate as if they had happened a moment ago.