Keegan.  Well, he’ll get to Heaven before you if you’re not careful, Patsy.  And now you listen to me, once and for all.  You’ll talk to me and pray for me by the name of Pether Keegan, so you will.  And when you’re angry and tempted to lift your hand agen the donkey or stamp your foot on the little grasshopper, remember that the donkey’s Pether Keegan’s brother, and the grasshopper Pether Keegan’s friend.  And when you’re tempted to throw a stone at a sinner or a curse at a beggar, remember that Pether Keegan is a worse sinner and a worse beggar, and keep the stone and the curse for him the next time you meet him.  Now say God bless you, Pether, to me before I go, just to practise you a bit.

Patsy.  Sure it wouldn’t be right, Fadher.  I can’t—­

Keegan.  Yes you can.  Now out with it; or I’ll put this stick into your hand an make you hit me with it.

Patsy [throwing himself on his knees in an ecstasy of adoration].  Sure it’s your blessin I want, Fadher Keegan.  I’ll have no luck widhout it.

Keegan [shocked].  Get up out o that, man.  Don’t kneel to me:  I’m not a saint.

Patsy [with intense conviction].  Oh in throth yar, sir. [The grasshopper chirps.  Patsy, terrified, clutches at Keegan’s hands] Don’t set it on me, Fadher:  I’ll do anythin you bid me.

Keegan [pulling him up].  You bosthoon, you!  Don’t you see that it only whistled to tell me Miss Reilly’s comin?  There!  Look at her and pull yourself together for shame.  Off widja to the road:  you’ll be late for the car if you don’t make haste [bustling him down the hill].  I can see the dust of it in the gap already.

Patsy.  The Lord save us! [He goes down the hill towards the road like a haunted man].

Nora Reilly comes down the hill.  A slight weak woman in a pretty muslin print gown [her best], she is a figure commonplace enough to Irish eyes; but on the inhabitants of fatter-fed, crowded, hustling and bustling modern countries she makes a very different impression.  The absence of any symptoms of coarseness or hardness or appetite in her, her comparative delicacy of manner and sensibility of apprehension, her thin hands and slender figure, her travel accent, with the caressing plaintive Irish melody of her speech, give her a charm which is all the more effective because, being untravelled, she is unconscious of it, and never dreams of deliberately dramatizing and exploiting it, as the Irishwoman in England does.  For Tom Broadbent therefore, an attractive woman, whom he would even call ethereal.  To Larry Doyle, an everyday woman fit only for the eighteenth century, helpless, useless, almost sexless, an invalid without the excuse of disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove him out of it.  These judgments have little value and no finality; but they are the judgments on which her fate hangs just at present.  Keegan touches his hat to her:  he does not take it off.