Connemara Maggie was standing by the fire drying Gypo’s shirt, his jacket and his socks. The big boots were resting on a fender before the fire, steaming. She took no notice of Mulholland’s entrance. With her golden hair hanging in disorder over her face, with her blouse undone, with her strong, heavy-boned face covered with perspiration, with her great, soft eyes swollen and gentle like the eyes of a heifer, she busied herself tending her man, just as if she had never left the purity of her Connemara hills and she were tending her peasant spouse after a hard day’s work in the fields; instead of tending a casual lover in the sordid environment of a brothel. There was no hint of vice or of libidinous pleasure in her face or in her movements. She seemed to be, like Gypo himself, a child of the earth, unconscious of the artificial sins that are the handiwork of the city. In her two brawny arms she held the steaming shirt to the blaze. She stood silent and immovable. There was little else in the small, whitewashed, low-ceilinged room. A bed with the clothes tousled on it, a quilt that lay on the floor by the bed, a chair on three legs and a weatherbeaten washstand, containing a basin and a broken jug, comprised the furniture. Mulholland looked around at all this before he spoke. It was as well to get the correct details in case identification were necessary. Gypo might deny it. Then he spoke. He had recovered his nerve. “No,” he said. “I don’t want a drink. It’s time for ye to be comin’.” “Be off with ye, ye little divil,” yelled Gypo, suddenly jumping to his feet, with a great scraping and slapping noise. “Who are ye givin’ orders to?” He took a pace forward and reached out his right hand, but Mulholland had drawn his revolver and taken a pace to his rear. At the same time he called out in a hissing whisper: “It’s not me orders. It’s the Commandant’s orders, an’ ye better be careful about disobeyin’ them.”