The polling day came, and passed with but little excitement.

“You wouldn’t har’ly know it,” said a voter, who had returned to his normal avocations after a morning wasted, as he considered, in the task of recording his vote.  “There was a few men drunk in the town.  Which won is it?  Bedad, they dunno yet.  Father Sweeny it was marched in the Pribawn boys.  Faith, he had them well regulated.  Very nate they marched, very nate entirely.  They never were in such rotation!”

The voter bent melancholy and slightly bloodshot eyes upon Christian, and awaited her reply.

Christian, with her usual miscellaneous company of dogs, was on her way to visit a woman whose husband had died not long before.  Her way took her along the banks of the Broadwater, and during one of the frequent pauses, necessitated by the investigations into the private affairs of water-rats and others, made by her companions, she and Peter Callaghan had exchanged greetings.  He and Christian had fallen into talk, with the absence of formality that is, perhaps, peculiar to intercourse between his class and hers.  He leant upon his scythe, and discoursed seriously and courteously.  He wore a soft, slouched black hat, that did not wholly conceal his thick and curly hair, in which there was scarcely a grey strand, though he was, as he told Christian, the one age with her father.  His white flannel jacket was wrapped round him, its skirts pushed under the band of his brown frieze trousers.  A red wisp of rag was knotted round his middle, and held all together.  His pale grey and wistful eyes looked at Christian from above a tangled thicket of grizzled moustache and beard.  He suggested almost equally, a conventional Saint Joseph and a stage-brigand—­a brigand, as it might be, who had joined the Salvation Army.  “As old as I am,” he returned, dreamily, to the affair of the morning, “I stepped it away with them!”

He turned his eyes from Christian’s face to the large and sliding brightness of the river.

There followed a moment of silence that was filled by the yelps of the little dogs who had marked a water-rat to ground, and the hobble-de-hoy shouts of the hound puppies, uttered with no definite idea of the cause of their enthusiasm, but none the less enthusiastic for that reason.

“Are you the youngest young lady, I beg your pardon?” Peter Callaghan asked presently.  “It’s long since I seen you.  Your father knows me well.  I remember of one time when the hounds was crossing my land, and I seen yourself and your sisther taking the hur’ls.  I cries out to ye ‘me heart’d rise at ye, my darlins!’ and the Major, he laughs!”

“I remember jumping the hurdles,” said Christian; “I’ll tell my father I met you.”

“He gave me permission to cut the ‘looha’ in these fields,” resumed Peter Callaghan.  “I’m thankful to him.  I have a good sop of it cut.”

He waved a hand; Christian saw, at a little distance, a heap of rushes, and, seated on it, a girl, of whose presence she had been unaware.  She was very pale, and there was a fixity of sadness about her.  Christian spoke to her, but she did not appear to notice.