But she walked slowly beside him, calling him by name, and she took his hand and slowed his steps although he walked uneasily on the road as a man half blind might go. She kept beside him and after a little she drew her arm through his and his arm bent to meet her touch even while his words were still muttered oaths and threats of violent hurt. His arm yielded to her touch and his fingers bent over her hand, and presently she began to talk of other things, of the trouble the mule had given that day, jumping the fence and wandering down the road. Mrs Donahue had passed and had stopped to talk for a while. She had said that Susie Whelen was a bold girl with her eyes on Pius. She herself had been three days looking for the cog from the sausage mill, and she had tumbled out all the rubbish from the shed and had picked it over, scrap by scrap, and where did he think she had found the cog in the end? On the top of the high fence post over beside the barn, laid up there some time in somebody’s hurry. Then she began to talk of themselves, taking more entire possession of his sense and his thought. The time had been long when he was away, and why had he not written her a letter? She had cried in the night thinking that something might have harmed him, and once she had gone, past midnight, to the hill above the quarry, and she had been ready at any hour of the day or the night to go with him, for he had only to call to her. All the others had said, ‘He’s gone for good. You’ll never see a sight of him again,’ and she told him of those who had said this in one way or another, recounting what each had said.

Then he was telling her that he had had never a thought of anything else but to come. She had led him out of the road onto the lane that went toward the south, and the way was soft underfoot, dry with autumn dust, and thus they went far, winding among the hills, now upward and now down. The night was lit only by the stars. She talked from time to time, murmuring responses to his endearments, or murmuring the idle thoughts and surmises of her mind, keeping him far from his anger and his losses.

‘The high bushes over there would be sassafras, red and maybe green, over there in clumps on the far side of the fence. Milkweed gone to seed is in the air today… There’s St Lucy’s bell. Can you hear it? It seems far off, hardly to sound at all. Can you hear?… The road comes here to a gate but I cannot tell what is beyond… We will fasten the gate after us or their cattle might stray…’

The fences had fallen away from the lane and now the road drifted out into an open space that rose slowly as they walked, a mere beaten path which the cattle took as they went back into remote pasturage. They could no longer hear the dogs bark at Whelen’s or at Stigall’s, for they had walked far. The moon was rising down on the edge of the sky, and after a while they came out onto an upland and passed among a few scattered trees beyond which the land fell away suddenly, making a precipice below, stones rising on the left in great blocks, the hard dolomite, that made a cliff above, so that they stood on a shelf at the side of a wall that reached above and fell below them. Their feet were among fallen leaves, and below they could see the treetops, lit by the misty light of the rising moon, or they sat on the ledge, looking out over some great vale, their sentences falling, now one and now the other, or slipping over each other as their thoughts ran eagerly.