"Listen to the man! 'Pon me word, ye'd never desarve a bit o' good look, Dan Brophy, ye've that little sense. What call have we to go pinchin' an' scrapin' now, will ye tell me? Us that's goin' to spend the rest of our days in peace an' comfort. Sure, Larry'll let us want for nothin' while we live."
"Aye, indeed," returned her husband; "I was forgettin' that."
He went out obediently, and presently his voice was heard dolorously "chuck-chucking" to the hens. When he re-entered he sat down on the stool again, with the same puzzled air which had formerly irritated his wife.
"I wonder," he said, "how in the world we'll be managin'. Will I go down to the station beyant, an' give them that money ordher, an' tell them Larry bid them give us tickets to America for it, or will I have to take it to the post-office first? Mrs. Murphy said it was a post-office ordher, but sure they wouldn't be givin' us tickets for America at the post-office."
"Ah, what a gom ye are!" said Mary. It was her favourite and wholly untranslatable term of opprobrium.
"Afther that," as Dan invariably said, "there was no use in talkin' to Mary." He suspected that on this occasion she was feeling a little puzzled herself, but wisely resolved to postpone the discussion till she should be in a better humour.
Next morning, when the old man rose and went out of the house, as usual, to fetch a pailful of water from the stream which ran at the foot of the hill, he cast lingering glances about him. It would be a queer thing, he thought, to look out in the morning on any other view than this familiar one, which had greeted his waking eyes in his far away childhood, and on which he had expected to look his last only when the day came whereon he should close them for ever. On the other side of the rugged brown shoulder of that hill was the little chapel, under the shadow of which he had hoped one day to be laid to rest. Pausing, pail in hand, he began to wonder to himself where he would have had the monument which, if he and Mary had already departed, was, by Larry's request, to have surmounted their remains. There was an empty space to the right of the gate—it would have looked well there—real handsome, Dan opined. With his mind full of this thought he returned to Mary, and immediately imparted it to her.
"Alanna, we wouldn't have known ourselves, we'd have been so grand," he added. "Goold letthers, no less. I don't know that I'd altogether fancy them little skulls, though. They would have been altogether too mournful. I'd sooner have R.I.P. at all the corners—wouldn't you?"
"Maybe I would an' maybe I wouldn't," said Mary. "We needn't be botherin' our heads about it. Larry'll be apt to be puttin' up a tombstone over us when we do go."
"Sure what good will that do us over there where nobody knows us?" murmured Dan discontentedly. "If it was here where all the neighbours 'ud be lookin' at it, it 'ud be somethin'-like. But what signifies what kind of an ould gully-hole they throw us into over beyant—there'll be nobody to pass a remark about us, or to put up a prayer for us afther we're gone, only Larry and his wife; an' I question if she's the lady to be throublin' her head over the like of us."