“And I am forty-seven years of age! The years go by doing what I know to me, but for her there has been only the time to ripen what was immature. The green fruit will be ruddy and fragrant worked on by the sun and the wind. What age is she now, woman?”
“She is seven years older in time, and twenty years older in hardship. She will have forgotten how to lie in a bed, or how to eat proper food.”
“She will surely have changed,” said Conachúr.
A brisk moment returned to the great man, and he aroused himself.
“How will she look after her years of lying in the butt of a wet ditch or in the bog?”
“Ah me!” said Lavarcham.
“She will have plodded over tough hills with a thin belly and a dry lip. She will have slept with her fingers in her mouth to keep them warm in the winter. She will be lean and red-handed and windy-faced; with the arches of her feet broken down by too much walking, and her knees sagging under her like an old ploughman’s. Is that how the Troubler will look, Lavarcham?”
“I think, master, that she may be a long, thin, tough woman. She will be rheumatic——”
“She will awaken in the night coughing like a sick horse,” said the cheerful king.
“I do not wish to see her,” said Lavarcham sourly.