“But--oh, damn it all, Patsy, what a fool you are! That’s not the truth. Can’t you see that it’s not the truth? Will I be obliged to leave a mark on your ugly face with my fist to prove to you that I’m not in America?” “It was all the truth we had for her, anyway. But we wouldn’t tell her. And why not? Because she was a fine girl, and we didn’t want to see her going off into a decline before our eyes and maybe dying on us. And because we had a respect for your memory; and that’s more than you had for yourself, hiding away here from a girl that any man might be proud to own. And it’s more than you have for us, putting the hard word on us, and we doing the best we could from the start.” Dr. O’Grady was a reasonable man. His anger cooled. He came to see that his friends had acted with the best intentions. He apologized handsomely to Patsy Devlin. “All the same,” he added, “you will have to go. I tell you what it is, if the police do come here, the Field Marshal will shoot the two of us. He told me himself that that’s what he’d do. And, whatever else he may be, he’s a man of his word.” “He dursn’t, not with the police in the house. He’d be hanged.” “He doesn’t care a pin whether he’s hanged or not. As a matter of fact, I expect he’d rather like to be hanged. He’s an anti-militarist.” “I was just thinking,” said Patsy, “when he gave the word of command to me there in the yard, that he’d been in the militia himself some time.” “Well, he hasn’t, so you’re out there. So far as I can make out, one of his main objects in life is to blow up the militia, and the regular army along with it. He’s an anarchist of the most advanced kind.” “Be damn, and is he that?” “He is. And I can tell you an anarchist isn’t what you’d call a playboy. Anarchism isn’t a bit like your futile old League. It doesn’t go about the country making speeches and pretending it’s going to boycott people that it hasn’t the least notion of doing any harm to. A genuine anarchist, a man like the Field Marshal, for instance, doesn’t say a word to anybody, but just goes quietly and blows up a town.” “I’ll not have you speaking against the League, doctor. I’ve been a member of it since ever there was a branch started in Clonmore. I’d be a member of it still, if it wasn’t that they went against me the time of the election of the inspector of sheep dipping. I can tell you there’s them in it would think very little of making the country hot for the man that went against the will of the people in the matter of grazing ranches or the like.”