“Well! How far do you go?” he put to the man from Connemara and then to them in turn, and each time the answer came, “Ireland.” He seemed unduly astonished.

He lighted a pipe, and pointed it toward the little boy. “What have you been doing in England, eh?”

Victor writhed forward and set his teeth into the strap of the outer door.

“He’s been to a wedding,” said the young wife, as though she and Victor were saying the same thing in two different ways, and smiled on him fully for the first time.

“Who got married?”

“Me brother,” Victor said in a strangled voice, still holding on recklessly while the train, starting with a jerk, rocked him to the side.

“Big wedding?”

Two greyhounds in plaid blankets, like dangerously ecstatic old ladies hoping no one would see them, rushed into, out of, then past the corridor door which the incoming Welshman had failed to shut behind him. The glare in the eye of the man who followed, with his belt flying about him as he pulled back on the dogs, was wild, too.

“Big wedding?”

“Me family was all over the place if that’s what you mean.” Victor wildly chewed; there was a smell of leather.

“Ah, it has driven his poor mother to her bed, it was that grand a wedding,” said the young wife. “That’s why she’s in England, and Victor here on his own.”

“You must have missed school. What school do you go to—you go to school?” By the power of his eye, the Welshman got Victor to let go the strap and answer yes or no.

“School, yes.”

“You study French and so on?”

“Ah, them languages is no good. What good is Irish?” said Victor passionately, and somebody said, “Now what does your mother tell you?”

“What ails your mother?” said the Welshman.

“Ah, it’s her old trouble. Ask her. But there’s two of me brothers at one end and five at the other.”

“You’re divided.”

The young wife let Victor stand on the seat and haul her paper parcel off the rack so she could give him an orange. She drew out as well a piece of needlepoint, square and tarnished, which she spread over her pretty arm and hung before their eyes.

“Beautiful!”

“‘A Wee Cottage’ is the name it has.”

“I see the cottage. ’Tis very wee, and so’s every bit about it.”

“’Twould blind you: ’tis a work of art.”

“The little rabbit peeping out!”

“Makes you wish you had your gun,” said the Welshman to Victor.

The young wife said, “Me grandmother. At eighty she died, very sudden, on a visit to England. God rest her soul. Now I’m bringing this masterpiece home to Ireland.”

“Who could blame you.”

“Well you should bring it away, all those little stitches she put in.”