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Sean and Eva ate in silence that night. The brehon, having gone to visit Father Donal, had sent word that he would remain with the priest and his family until his departure early in the morning. Maurice had gone to the barn to be alone. Though Eva had asked him to come back in, he had requested, politely as always, that he might be allowed to remain alone with his thoughts; and so, after giving his arm an awkward but affectionate squeeze, Eva had left him there.

Sean had already announced that he would be going up to the high pasture again in the morning. The two of them sat—he apparently satisfied, she in stony silence—until at last, when the meal was done, she remarked to him: “I shall never get over this, you know.”

“You will in time.” He had an apple in his hand. He cut it into four pieces with his knife, leaving the seeds in, and ate one of the quarters, swallowing the seeds. “What’s done is done,” he observed. “You love him anyway. He’s a fine boy.”

“Oh, he is fine,” she acknowledged. “It is amazing to me only,” she added bitterly, “that someone so fine could be your son.”

“Do you think so?” He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, it would seem that with his mother I could make a finer son than I could with you.” And he picked up another piece of the quartered apple.

Her head went forward. The pain of the cruel words was so great, it was like a dagger stabbed into her stomach. She thought of Fintan.

“Do you love anybody?” she asked at last. “Other than yourself?”

“I do.” He let the words dangle like a bait before a fish in the stream, but she had wisdom enough to turn away.

They remained in silence for as long as it took him, at his calculated leisure, to eat the other two quarters of the apple.

“He must go,” she said.

“You’re a great one for throwing people out of my house,” he remarked. “Is it my own son you’re wanting to be rid of now?”

“He must go, Sean. You say that I love him, and it’s true. But I can’t stand it. He must go.”

“My son will stay in his father’s house,” he replied with finality; and with that he got up and went to bed, leaving her sitting in the hall, wondering what she should do. She sat there all night.

Did she really want him gone? She thought of all that Maurice had meant to her. Certainly none of this was the boy’s fault. How must he be feeling now, out there in the barn, thinking about the deception that everyone had practised upon himself all these years. Was she re-enacting the business with the Brennan girl, insisting that he go? Wasn’t it just the same battle with her husband’s will? Wasn’t it the same, all over again, except that now he had increased the pain and the humiliation? Now he had even made her love the boy, the cause of her pain, and then poisoned that love. Oh, he had been clever. You had to give him that. He’d made her drain a bitter cup.

And that was why she couldn’t bear to have Maurice there anymore. It seemed to her, as the dawn broke, that she had no way out.

But a few hours later the decision was taken out of their hands by Maurice himself who, for the first time in the years he had been with them, quietly but firmly refused to obey the man that he now knew was his father. He told them he wanted to leave.

“I will visit you often, Father,” he said, “and you, too, if I may,” he added to Eva, with a gentle look of sadness in those wonderful eyes of his, so strange and emerald green.

“You needn’t go, Maurice,” she cried. “You don’t have to go.”

But his determination was absolute. “It’s for the best,” he said.

“Where will you go?” Sean asked him, a little heavily. “To Munster?”

“To see the mother who betrayed me and her husband who doesn’t want me?” He shook his head sadly. “If I see my mother I might curse her.”

“Where, then?”

“I have decided, Father,” he said, “to go to Dublin.”

MacGowan was most surprised when Maurice arrived at his house. And he was even more astonished when Maurice told him his story. It wasn’t often that the grey merchant discovered a long-standing secret, however intimate, that he didn’t already