Everybody rose and looked. A great crow, black as night, had come in at the open door of the mill, calmly, sedately, as if by habit, for the corn that usually lay there.
“It manes divorce,” said Black Tom.
“Scare it away,” cried some one.
“It's the new wife must do it,” said another.
“Where's Kate?” cried Nancy.
But Kate only looked and went on laughing as before.
The crow turned tail and took flight of itself at finding so eager an audience. Then Pete said, “Whose houlding with such ould wife's wonders?”
And Cæsar answered, “Coorse not, or fairies either. I've slept out all night on Cronk-ny-airy-Lhaa—before my days of grace, I mane—and I never seen no fairies.”
“It would be a fool of a fairy, though, that would let you see him, Cæsar,” said Black Tom.
At nine o'clock Cæsar's gig was at the door of “The Manx Fairy” to take the bride and bridegroom home. They had sung “Mylecharane,” and “Keerie fu Snaighty,” and “Hunting the Wren,” and “The Win' that Shook the Barley,” and then they had cleared away the tables and danced to the fiddle of John the Clerk and the clarionet of Jonaique Jelly. Kate, with wild eyes and flushed cheeks, had taken part in everything, but always fiercely, violently, almost tempestuously, until people lost enjoyment of her heartiness in fear of her hysteria, and Cæsar whispered Pete to take her away, and brought round the gig to hasten them.