MARY
nudging Michael.—Did you see that, Michael Byrne? Didn’t you hear me telling you she’s flighty a while back since the change of the moon? With her fussing for marriage, and she making whisper-talk with one man or another man along by the road.
MICHAEL
—Whist now, or she’ll knock the head of you the time she comes back.
MARY
—Ah, it’s a bad, wicked way the world is this night, if there’s a fine air in it itself. You’d never have seen me, and I a young woman, making whisper-talk with the like of him, and he the fearfullest old fellow you’d see any place walking the world.
[Sarah comes back quickly.
MARY
calling out to her.—What is it you’re after whispering above with himself?
SARAH
exultingly.—Lie down, and leave us in peace. She whispers with Michael.
MARY
poking out her pipe with a straw, sings—
She’d whisper with one, and she’d whisper with two—
She breaks off coughing.—My singing voice is gone for this night, Sarah Casey. (She lights her pipe.) But if it’s flighty you are itself, you’re a grand handsome woman, the glory of tinkers, the pride of Wicklow, the Beauty of Ballinacree. I wouldn’t have you lying down and you lonesome to sleep this night in a dark ditch when the spring is coming in the trees; so let you sit down there by the big bough, and I’ll be telling you the finest story you’d hear any place from Dundalk to Ballinacree, with great queens in it, making themselves matches from the start to the end, and they with shiny silks on them the length of the day, and white shifts for the night.
MICHAEL
standing up with the tin can in his hand.—Let you go asleep, and not have us destroyed.
MARY
lying back sleepily.—Don’t mind him, Sarah Casey. Sit down now, and I’ll be telling you a story would be fit to tell a woman the like of you in the springtime of the year.
SARAH
taking the can from Michael, and tying it up in a piece of sacking.—That’ll not be rusting now in the dews of night. I’ll put it up in the ditch the way it will be handy in the morning; and now we’ve that done, Michael Byrne, I’ll go along with you and welcome for Tim Flaherty’s hens.