The conversation died away; the boy and girl pressed closer for warmth and presently both were asleep. When they awoke the pale dawn was breaking. A drunken man lay asleep at their feet, his face turned upwards, one arm stretched out at full length and the other curled over his breast. Beside him on the deck was an empty whisky bottle and the bowl of a broken clay pipe.
“Have ye seen Scotland yet?” asked the girl, rubbing her fingers over her eyelids.
“That’s it, I think,” Dermod answered, pointing at the coastline which showed like a well-defined cloud against the sky-line miles away.
“Have we passed Paddy’s Milestone?”
“I don’t know. I was sleepin’.”
“Isn’t it like Ireland?” remarked Norah after she had gazed for a while in silence at the coastline. “I would like to be goin’ back again, Dermod,” she said.
“I’m goin’ to make a great fortune in Scotland, Norah,” said the youth, releasing the girl’s hand which he had held all night. “And I’m goin’ to make ye a lady.”
“Why would ye be goin’ to do the likes of that?”
“I don’t know,” Dermod confessed, and the boy and girl laughed together.