Second Hag: You would, and it’s likely he’d play a notion into the skulls of the pampootied boys from Aran, they to be kings of France or of Germany, till they’d go lift their head to the clouds and go knocking all before them.  And the police it is likely laughing with themselves, as if listening to the talk of the blackbird would be perched upon a blessed bush.

First Hag: I wonder he did not come.  Could it be he might be made away with for the riches he brought from Cregroostha?  It would be a strange thing now, he to be lying and his head broke, at the butt of a wall, and the woman he thought the whole world of to be getting her burial from the workhouse.

   (A sound of pipes.)

Second Hag: Whist, I tell you!  It’s the sound of the pipes.  It is McDonough, it is no other one.

First Hag: (Getting up.) I’m in dread of him coming in the house.  He is a hasty man and wicked, and he vexed.  What at all will he say and she being dead before him?  Whether or no, it will be a sharp grief to him, she to scatter and to go.  He might give me a backstroke and drive me out from the door.

Second Hag: Let you make an attack upon himself before he will have time to make his own attack.

McDonough: (Coming in.) Catherine!  Where is she?  Where is Catherine?

First Hag: Is it readying the dinner before you, or wringing out a shirt for the Sunday like any good slave of a wife, you are used to find your woman, McDonough?

McDonough: What call would she have stopping in the house with the withered like of yourself?  It is not to the crabbed talk of a peevish hag a handsome young woman would wish to be listening and sport and funning being in the fair outside.

First Hag: Go look for her in the fair so, if it is gadding up and down is her habit, and you being gone out from her sight.

McDonough:  (Shaking her.) Tell me out, where is she?

First Hag: Tell out what harbour were you yourself in from the day you left Cregroostha?

McDonough: Is it that she got word?—­or that she was tired waiting for me?

First Hag: She is gone away from you, McDonough.

McDonough: That is a lie, a black lie.

First Hag: Throwing a lie in a decent woman’s face will not bring you to the truth.

McDonough: Is it what you are laying down that she went away with some other man?  Say that out if you have courage, and I’ll wring your yellow windpipe.

First Hag: Leave your hand off me and open the room door, and you will see am I telling you any lie.

McDonough:  (Goes to door, then stops.) She is not in it.  She would have come out before me, and she hearing the sound of the pipes.

First Hag: It is not the sound of the pipes will rouse her, or any sound made in this world at all.