Davey had said good-bye to the Schoolmaster.
"Well, I'll be going now," he said, moving away clumsily.
He had said all he could, though there was not much of that. Most of what he wanted to say remained deep within him. He could not dig it up. The words to express his feeling would not come. He had muttered something about "passing that way" and having come in "to say good-bye," when he entered the big, bare room at Steve's.
He had not seen Deirdre, nor the Schoolmaster, since the night of the fires. His father had kept him busy; and with all the work of the new buildings going up at Ayrmuir there was plenty to do. He talked of it for a while in a strained, uninterested fashion.
"Deirdre told me mother put up a great fight for the house," he said, "but of course the old man doesn't give her credit for that—thinks he could have saved it, if he had been on the spot in time. I wish he had been there. I'd like to 've seen if he could've beaten a fire—with that wind against him. I might've been with mother a bit earlier and been able to help her, if I'd had a decent nag—and that's what I told him—but I'm not likely to get one. The expense of the new buildings has got him down, and he's mad because Nat left a couple of hundred yearlings in one of the back paddocks. We ran in about a hundred of 'em last week—found some burnt to cinders—the others 've got away."
Awkwardly, uncertainly, he shifted his feet. He did not want to go, to say the final words, and yet he did not know how to stay. Farrel understood that and kept him talking longer. He was still wearing a bandage over his left eye.
"Your eye's all right, isn't it?" Davey asked. "It isn't seriously hurt? Mother was asking me the other day if it was better. She doesn't know how it happened, Mr. Farrel."
"How what happened?" Farrel asked.
A spasm of pain twitched his lean, sunburnt features. He was sitting with his back to the light on a low bench under the window.
"How you got that burn about your eyes," said Davey. "But I saw. If you hadn't tried to prevent the branch falling on mother, the way she was standing, it would have come down on her face."