“From London you are.” The Welshman bit down on his pipe and smoked.

“Oh my God.” The man from Connemara struck his head. “I have an English wife. How would she like that, I wouldn’t like to know? If all at once I begun on her in Irish! How would you like it if your husband would only speak to you in Irish? Or Welsh, my God?” He searched the eyes of all the women, and last of the young Irish sweetheart—who did not seem to grasp the question. “Aha ha ha!” he cried urgently and despairingly at her, asking her only to laugh with him.

But the young man’s arm was thrust along the seat and she was sitting under its arch as if it were the entrance to a cave, which surely they all must see.

“Will you eat a biscuit now?” the young wife gently asked the man from Connemara. He took one wordlessly; for the moment he had no English or Irish. So she broke open another paper parcel beside her. “I have oceans,” she said.

“Oh, you wait,” said the lady in the raincoat, rising. And she opened a parcel as big as a barrel and it was full of everything to eat that anybody could come out of England with alive.

She offered candy, jam roll, biscuits, bananas, nuts, sections of bursting orange, and bread and butter, and they all in the flush of the hospitality and heat sat eating. Everybody partook but the Welshman, who had presumably had a dinner in Wales. It was more than ever like a little party, all the finer somehow, sadly enough, for the nose against the windowpane. They poured out tea from a couple of steaming thermoses; the black windows—for the sun was down now, never having been out of the fogs and rains all day—coated warmly over between them and what flew by out there.

“Could you tell me the name of a place to stay in Cork?” The American girl spoke up to the man from Connemara as he gave her a biscuit.

“In Cork? Ah, but you don’t want to be stopping in Cork. Killarney is where you would do well to go, if you’re wanting to see the wonders of Ireland. The lakes and the hills! Blue as blue skies, the lakes. That’s where you want to go, Killarney.”

“She wants to climb the Hill of Tara, you mean,” said the guard, who with a burst of cold wind had entered to punch their tickets again. “All the way up, and into the raths, too, to lay her eyes by the light of candles on something she’s never seen before; if that’s what she’s after. Have you never climbed the Hill and never crept into those, lady? Maybe ’twould take a little boost from behind, I don’t know your size; but I think ’twould not be difficult getting you through.” He gave her ticket its punch, with a keen blue glance at her, and banged out.