At a pleasure garden on a hill near Limerick, Eily O’Connor, the beautiful daughter of Mihil O’Connor, the rope-maker, first met Hardress Cregan, a young gentleman fresh from college; and on the same night, as she and her father were returning homeward, they were attacked by a rabble of men and boys, and rescued by the stranger and his hunchbacked companion, Danny Mann.  A few days afterwards Danny Mann visited the rope-walk, and had a long conversation with Eily, and from that time the girl’s character seemed to have undergone a change.  Her recreations and her attire became gayer; but her cheerfulness of mind was gone.  Her lover, Myles Murphy, a good-natured farmer from Killarney, gained over her father to his interests, and the old man pressed her either to give consent to the match or a good reason for her refusal.  After a distressing altercation, Eily left the house without a word of farewell.

She had married Hardress Cregan secretly, and the priest had died immediately after the ceremony.  The first time she was seen, but not recognised, in her boyish husband’s company was by the Dalys, to which family his fellow-collegian and intimate friend, Kyrle Daly, belonged.  A boat passed along the river before their house containing a hooded girl, the hunchback, and Hardress Cregan himself.  After they had disappeared, Kyrle Daly rode to pay court to Anne Chute, Hardress’s cousin, and, to his great distress, learned that she could never be his wife although she had no other engagement.  From her manner he realised that he had a rival, and the knowledge plunged him into the deepest despair.  After her refusal he went to spend the night at one of his father’s dairy farms, a few miles down the river.  Whilst supper was being prepared, word came that Hardress’s boat was being swamped, with every soul aboard.

The collegian, however, brought the boat safely to the shore, and procured a room for his wife in the dairy-woman’s cottage, passing her off as a relative of Danny Mann’s.  She retired at once and Hardress and Kyrle sat talking together of Anne Chute.  The sight of his friend’s sufferings won Hardress’s sympathies.  He protested his disbelief in the idea of another attachment, and recommended perseverance.

“Trust everything to me,” he said.  “For your sake I will take some pains to become better known to this extraordinary girl, and you may depend on it you shall not suffer in my good report.”

When the household was asleep, Hardress went to his wife’s room, and found her troubled because of the strangeness of their circumstances.

“I was thinking,” she said, “what a heart-break it would be to my father if anyone put it into his head that the case was worse than it is.  No more would be wanting, but just a little word on a scrap of paper, to let him know that he needn’t be uneasy, and he’d know all in time.”

The suggestion appeared to jar against the young husband’s inclinations.  He replied that if she wished he would return with her to her home, and declare the marriage.