He saluted as she overtook him, and spoke of the pleasant afternoon.... She hoped he was enjoying his holidays here in the valley. He seemed to be spending the time very quietly. Reading? Poetry? Just fancy! The Daffodil Fields, by John Masefield. What a pretty name! Was he devoted to poetry, and was this particular poem a good one?
"It is a great tale of love and passion that happened in one of the quiet places of the world," he told her with a kind of enthusiasm coming into his words for the first time.
"One of the quiet places?" she murmured, evidently at a loss for something else to say.
"Yes, a quiet place which must have been like this place and yet, at the same time, most wonderfully different, for no poet at all could imagine any tale of love and passion springing from the life about us here. The people of the valley seem to have died before they were born. I will lend you this poem, if you'd care to have it."
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Shannon!" she said.
They had wandered down a lane which led from the high road towards the peaceful fields beyond the little lake. This lane, he told her, was called "The Road of the Dead," and would afford her a short cut to her lodging at Sergeant McGoldrick's.
For lack of anything else to say, she remarked upon the strangeness of this name—The Road of the Dead. He said it seemed a title particularly suitable. He went on to elaborate the idea he had just expressed:
"Around and about here they are all dead—dead. No passion of any kind comes to light their existence. Their life is a thing done meanly, shudderingly within the shadow of the grave. That is how I have been seeing it for the past few weeks. They hate the occurrence of new people in their midst. They hate me already, and now they will hate you. The sight of us walking together like this must surely cause them to hate us still more."
She was wondering that his words should hold a sense of consideration for her, seeing that they had been acquainted only such a short while.
"This way leads from a graveyard to a graveyard, and they have a silly superstition that dead couples are sometimes seen walking here. Particularly dismal also do I consider this picture of their imagination. The idea of any one thinking us a dead couple!"