At that moment of the vessel’s stirring, little Kate O’Mahony broke from the group in which her mother and the nuns stood dignifiedly apart, and ran wildly to the pier’s edge, where Jerry caught and for the moment held her, struggling, over the widening chasm between the boat and the quay. Her power to speak had come at last. “Take me with you, O’Mahony!” she cried, fighting like a wild thing to free herself. “Oh, take me with you! You promised! You promised! _Take_ me with you!” It was then that The O’Mahony’s face lost, in a flash, its perfunctory smile. He half stretched out his hand--then swung himself on his heel and marched to the prow of the vessel. He did not look back again upon Muirisc. ***** An hour later a police-car, bearing five armed men, halted at the point on the mountain-road from Durrus where Muirisc comes first in view. The constables, gazing out upon the broad expanse of Dunmanus Bay, saw on the distant water-line a yawl-rigged coasting vessel, white against the stormy sky. Some chance whim suggested to their minds an interest in this craft. But when they descended into Muirisc they could not find a soul who had the remotest notion of what a yawl-rig meant, much less of the identity of the lugger which, even as they spoke, had passed out of sight. CHAPTER XVI--THE LADY OF MUIRISC. In the parish of Kilmoe--which they pronounce with a soft prolonged “moo-h,” like the murmuring call of one of their little bright-eyed, black-coated cows--the inhabitants are wont to say that the next parish is America. It is an ancient and sterile and storm-beaten parish, this Kilmoe, thrust out in expiation of some forgotten sin or other to exist beyond the pale of human companionship. Its sons and daughters, scattered in tiny, isolated hamlets over its barren area, hear never a stranger’s voice--and their own speech is slow and low of tone because the real right to make a noise there belongs to the shrieking gulls and the wild, west wind and the towering, foam-fanged waves, which dashed themselves, in tireless rivalry with the thunder, against its cliffs. Slow, too, in growth and ripening are the wits of the men of Kilmoe. They must have gray hairs before they are accounted more than boys; and when, from sheer old age they totter into the grave, the feeling of the parish is that they have been untimely cut off just as they were beginning to get their brains in fair working: order. Very often these aged men, if they dally and loiter on the way to the tomb in the hope of becoming still wiser, are given a sharp and peremptory push forward by starvation. It would not do for the men of Kilmoe to know too much. If they did, they would all go somewhere else to live--and then what would become of their landlord?