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112 nothing. Then, when they recalled to mind that famous visit of Dermot's up to Shiana's house, they came to the conclusion that Dermot was not quite so ignorant of his own business as they had thought.

"Ah!" they would say to each other, "there isn't a ghost or a pooka that doesn't know what he is about."

Michael and his mother were really heavy-hearted over the matter. Certainly Hannah knew that Sive had had nothing whatever to do with the breaking off of the match, but Michael did not know that. And if Hannah was heavy-hearted because that pair were parted from one another for ever in this world, Michael was heavy-hearted, and vexed and furious, to think that such an evil fate should befall Shiana as that he should have made a promise of marriage to Sive.

—Why, she had put it into everybody's mouth. She had spread it through the country. Except Shiana himself and Short Mary and Hannah, there wasn't a single human creature that hadn't the story exactly as Sive had published it. Even as to John Kittach himself; it was firmly fixed in his mind that Shiana had really given a promise of marriage to Sive, and that it was that promise that was weighing on Shiana's mind the day they were walking in the field opposite Shiana's house, when he (John) was urging him to marry Mary,