“It takes six weeks, don’t you think?” The young wife appealed to them all. “To get over the journey. I tell me husband, a fortnight is never enough. Me husband is English, though. I’ve never liked England. I have six aunts all living there, too. Me mother’s sisters.” She smiled. “They all are hating it. Me grandmother died while she was in England.”

His cheeks sunk on his fists, Victor leaned forward over his knees. His hair, blue-black, whorled around the cowlick like a spinning gramophone record; he seemed to dream of being down on the ground, and fighting somebody on it.

“God rest her soul,” said the lady in the raincoat, as if she might have passed through the goods car and seen where Grandmother was riding with them, to her grave in Ireland; but in that case the young wife would have been with the dead, and not playing at mother with Victor.

“Then how much does the passage cost you? Fishguard to Cork, Cork back to Fishguard? I may decide to try it on holiday sometime.”

“Where are you leaving us this night?” asked the young wife, still in the voice in which she had spoken of her grandmother and her mother’s sisters.

He gave out a name to make her look more commiserating, and repeated, “What is the fare from Fishguard to Cork?”

They stopped just then at a dark station and a paper boy’s voice called his papers into the train.

“Oh my God. Where are we!”

The Welshman put up his finger and called for a paper, and one was brought inside to him by a strange, dark child.

At the sight of the man opening his newspaper, the lady in the raincoat spoke promptly and with her lips wooden, like an actress. “How did the race come out?”

“What’s that? Race? What race would that be?” He gave her that look he gave her the time she sat down on him. He stretched and rattled his paper without exposing it too widely to anybody.

She tilted her head. “Little Boy Blue, yes,” she murmured over his shoulder.

A discussion of Little Boy Blue arose while he kept on reading.

“How much money at a time do you bet on the races?” the Welshman asked suddenly, coming out from behind the paper. Then as suddenly he retreated, taking back the question entirely.

“Now the second race,” murmured the lady in the raincoat. Everybody wreathed in the Welshman. He was in the middle of the Welsh news, silent as the dead.

The man from Connemara put up a hand as the page might have been turned, “Long Gone the favorite! You were long gone yourself,” he added politely to the lady in the raincoat. Possibly she had been punished enough for going out to eat and coming in to fall down all over a man.