Page:The Country-House Party.djvu/51

Rh to get him down. It was not long before he was on his way home, carried by four big lads, and they looking all about to keep the tears from falling from their eyes, for Mike O'Dwyer was well liked in spite of his wild ways. But the women raised a keen over him that well might have awakened the dead, and it did that same sure enough; for when Mike was laid down gently on his bed, and Moll on her knees beside him crying, he raised his head and spoke.

That's an ill tune," says he, "you are all singing."

'Well, the row there was then you may be sure, the women nearly fainting and the men looking as if they had seen a ghost. Moll O'Dwyer was the first to recover herself, and if she didn't give it to him then and there.

Oh," says she, "the disgrace to a decent woman, to have a husband who was hanged, mo vrone; but this is the worst of all your bad acts, Mike O'Dwyer. Oh, but it's the trouble I have with you always, and the black disgrace. To come into my house, and you just off the gallows. Oh, you robber! What would my poor father say? May the heavens be his bed if he knew."