stood up, but when the dance was going to begin, Hanrahan chanced to
look down, and he took notice of his boots that were worn and broken,
and the ragged grey socks showing through them; and he said angrily
it was a bad floor, and the music no great things, and he sat down in
the dark place beside the hearth. But if he did, the girl sat down
there with him.

The dancing went on, and when that dance was over another was called
for, and no one took much notice of Oona and Red Hanrahan for a
while, in the corner where they were. But the mother grew to be
uneasy, and she called to Oona to come and help her to set the table
in the inner room. But Oona that had never refused her before, said
she would come soon, but not yet, for she was listening to whatever
he was saying in her ear. The mother grew yet more uneasy then, and
she would come nearer them, and let on to be stirring the fire or
sweeping the hearth, and she would listen for a minute to hear what
the poet was saying to her child. And one time she heard him telling
about white-handed Deirdre, and how she brought the sons of Usnach to
their death; and how the blush in her cheeks was not so red as the
blood of kings' sons that was shed for her, and her sorrows had never
gone out of mind; and he said it was maybe the memory of her that
made the cry of the plover on the bog as sorrowful in the ear of the
poets as the keening of young men for a comrade. And there would
never have been that memory of her, he said, if it was not for the
poets that had put her beauty in their songs. And the next time she
did not well understand what he was saying, but as far as she could
hear, it had the sound of poetry though it was not rhymed, and this
is what she heard him say: 'The sun and the moon are the man and the
girl, they are my life and your life, they are travelling and ever
travelling through the skies as if under the one hood. It was God