He breakfasted early the next day, and got into his gig before nine.  He must face the enemy, and the earlier that he did it the better.  His difficulty now lay in arranging the proposition that he would make and the words that he should speak.  Every difficulty would be smoothed and every danger dispelled if he would only say that he would marry the girl as quickly as the legal forms would allow.  Father Marty, he knew, would see to all that, and the marriage might be done effectually.  He had quite come to understand that Father Marty was practical rather than romantic.  But there would be cowardice in this as mean as that other cowardice.  He believed himself to be bound by his duty to his family.  Were he now to renew his promise of marriage, such renewal would be caused by fear and not by duty, and would be mean.  They should tear him piecemeal rather than get from him such a promise.  Then he thought of the Captain, and perceived that he must make all possible use of the Captain’s character.  Would anybody conceive that he, the heir of the Scroope family, was bound to marry the daughter of a convict returned from the galleys?  And was it not true that such promise as he had made had been obtained under false pretences?  Why had he not been told of the Captain’s position when he first made himself intimate with the mother and daughter?

Instead of going as was his custom to Lahinch, and then rowing across the bay and round the point, he drove his gig to the village of Liscannor.  He was sick of Barney Morony and the canoe, and never desired to see either of them again.  He was sick indeed, of everything Irish, and thought that the whole island was a mistake.  He drove however boldly through Liscannor and up to Father Marty’s yard, and, not finding the priest at home, there left his horse and gig.  He had determined that he would first go to the priest and boldly declare that nothing should induce him to marry the daughter of a convict.  But Father Marty was not at home.  The old woman who kept his house believed that he had gone into Ennistown.  He was away with his horse, and would not be back till dinner time.  Then Neville, having seen his own nag taken from the gig, started on his walk up to Ardkill.

How ugly the country was to his eyes as he now saw it.  Here and there stood a mud cabin, and the small, half-cultivated fields, or rather patches of land, in which the thin oat crops were beginning to be green, were surrounded by low loose ramshackle walls, which were little more than heaps of stone, so carelessly had they been built and so negligently preserved.  A few cocks and hens with here and there a miserable, starved pig seemed to be the stock of the country.  Not a tree, not a shrub, not a flower was there to be seen.  The road was narrow, rough, and unused.  The burial ground which he passed was the liveliest sign of humanity about the place.  Then the country became still wilder, and there was no road.  The oats also ceased, and