Aunt Judy.  Oh, the Lord knows!  Romancin, I suppose.  Props she thinks Larry would go there to look for her and see her safe home.

Broadbent.  I’m afraid it’s all the fault of my motor.  Miss Reilly must not be left to wait and walk home alone at night.  Shall I go for her?

Aunt Judy [contemptuously].  Arra hwat ud happen to her?  Hurry in now, Corny.  Come, Mr Broadbent.  I left the tea on the hob to draw; and it’ll be black if we don’t go in an drink it.

They go up the hill.  It is dark by this time.

Broadbent does not fare so badly after all at Aunt Judy’s board.  He gets not only tea and bread-and-butter, but more mutton chops than he has ever conceived it possible to eat at one sitting.  There is also a most filling substance called potato cake.  Hardly have his fears of being starved been replaced by his first misgiving that he is eating too much and will be sorry for it tomorrow, when his appetite is revived by the production of a bottle of illicitly distilled whisky, called pocheen, which he has read and dreamed of [he calls it pottine] and is now at last to taste.  His good humor rises almost to excitement before Cornelius shows signs of sleepiness.  The contrast between Aunt Judy’s table service and that of the south and east coast hotels at which he spends his Fridays-to-Tuesdays when he is in London, seems to him delightfully Irish.  The almost total atrophy of any sense of enjoyment in Cornelius, or even any desire for it or toleration of the possibility of life being something better than a round of sordid worries, relieved by tobacco, punch, fine mornings, and petty successes in buying and selling, passes with his guest as the whimsical affectation of a shrewd Irish humorist and incorrigible spendthrift.  Aunt Judy seems to him an incarnate joke.  The likelihood that the joke will pall after a month or so, and is probably not apparent at any time to born Rossculleners, or that he himself unconsciously entertains Aunt Judy by his fantastic English personality and English mispronunciations, does not occur to him for a moment.  In the end he is so charmed, and so loth to go to bed and perhaps dream of prosaic England, that he insists on going out to smoke a cigar and look for Nora Reilly at the Round Tower.  Not that any special insistence is needed; for the English inhibitive instinct does not seem to exist in Rosscullen.  Just as Nora’s liking to miss a meal and stay out at the Round Tower is accepted as a sufficient reason for her doing it, and for the family going to bed and leaving the door open for her, so Broadbent’s whim to go out for a late stroll provokes neither hospitable remonstrance nor surprise.  Indeed Aunt Judy wants to get rid of him whilst she makes a bed for him on the sofa.  So off he goes, full fed, happy and enthusiastic, to explore the valley by moonlight.

The Round Tower stands about half an Irish mile from Rosscullen, some fifty yards south of the road on a knoll with a circle of wild greensward on it.  The road once ran over this knoll; but modern engineering has tempered the level to the Beeyankiny car by carrying the road partly round the knoll and partly through a cutting; so that the way from the road to the tower is a footpath up the embankment through furze and brambles.