"I 'll leave you a bit of the road," Grant offered.
They went out and down the loaning. Overhead a great white moon showed, a great silver plate of a thing whose beams scintillated in minute gossamer threads. Before them the road ran, as white as the moon, and everything showed in a faint purple—trees, fields, the singing river on the left of them, and the hill that rose between them and the sea. A little breeze was stirring and they could hear a soft soughing from the trees and a murmur from the beach. Somewhere behind them, on the Yellow Road probably, a corn-crake was venting its harmoniously raucous cry.
They stopped and looked about them. Beneath them the great plain of Louth lay, which Maeve of Connaught had once raided at the head of a hundred thousand men. And as Grant looked at it in the subtle moonlight the memory of forgotten legends came to him in vague uncoördinated fragments. There was Slieve Gullion behind him, where Cuala, the great artificer, hammered on his magic anvil night and day, and up whose slopes Finn MacCool had pursued the white deer without horns.
And in front of him was the sea, where for thrice three hundred years the Children of Lir had mourned in the guise of white swans. And on the hill beside him was the fortress of Bricriu of the poisoned tongue, whose satires killed men and withered the leaves on the green trees. Suddenly he heard Eunice's voice addressing him.
"I suppose you 've done well for yourself, Willie John?" she asked.
"Ay; I 've done well," he told her. "I 've got a business over there worth ten thousand dollars. And I 've built it up in twelve years."
"Ten thousand dollars!" she mused. "Two thousand pounds; that's a good deal. That's half as much as your brother Joe made, and it's a great deal more than I have myself."
"Brother Joe made!" he muttered in a tone of amazement.
"Yes—your brother Joe made," she answered naïvely. "He 's made as much as four thousand pounds trading in cattle between here and England, and buying horses for the Italian Government."
"Twenty thousand dollars!" Grant said, dumb-founded. "Brother Joe!"