"I don't want to see her at all, for she torments me, so let the pair of them walk their road until they come to a ditch that is full of thorns and is fit for them to die in."
"I think," said Caeltia, "that the reason you don't want to see her is because you want to see her too much."
"It's so," growled Mac Cann, "and it's so too that you are a prying kind of a man and that your mouth is never at rest, so we'll go on now to the woman yonder, and let you talk to her with your tongue and your nimble questions."
Thereupon he rushed forward and kicked the ass so suddenly in the belly that it leaped straight off the ground and began to run before its legs touched earth again.
When they had taken a few dozen steps Mac Cann began to roar furiously:
"What way are you, Eileen Ni Cooley? What sort of a man is it that's walking beside yourself?"
And he continued roaring questions such as that until they drew on the people.
The folk stopped at his shouts.
The woman was big and thin and she had red hair. Her face was freckled all over so that one could only see her delicate complexion in little spots, and at the first glance the resemblance between herself and Finaun was extraordinary. In the sweep of the brow, the set of the cheek-bones, a regard of the eyes, that resemblance was seen, and then the look vanished in a poise of the head and came again in another one.
At the moment her blue eyes seemed the angriest that ever were in a woman's head. She stood leaning on a thick ash-plant and watched the advancing company, but she did not utter a word to them.