He would have liked much to ask if Madame Le Maitre liked her husband, but if his own refinement had not forbidden, he had a wholesome idea that O'Shea, if roused, would be a dangerous enemy.
"I don't understand why, if she is married, she wears the dress of a religious order." "Never saw a nun dressed jist like her.

Guess if you went about kissing and embracing these women ye would find it an advantage to be pretty well covered up; but"-- here a long time of puffing at the pipe--"it's an advantage for more than women not to see too much of an angel." "Has she any relations, anyone of her own family?
Where do they live ?" There was no answer.
"I suppose you knew her people ?" O'Shea sprang up and opened the house door, and the snow drove in as he held it.
"I thought," he said, "I heard a body knocking." "No one knocked," said Caius impatiently.
"I heard someone." He stood looking very suspiciously out, and so good was his acting, if it was acting, that Caius, who came and looked over his shoulder, had a superstitious feeling when he saw the blank, untrodden snow stretching wide and white into the glimmering night.

He remembered that the one relative he believed the lady to have had appeared to him in strange places and vanished strangely.
"You didn't hear a knock; you were dreaming." Caius began to button on his coat.
"I wasn't even asleep." O'Shea gave a last suspicious look to the outside.
"O'Shea," said Caius, "has--has Madame Le Maitre a daughter ?" The farmer turned round to him in astonishment.

"Bless my heart alive, no!" The snow was only two or three inches deep when Caius walked home; it was light as plucked swan's-down about his feet.

Everywhere it was falling slowly in small dry flakes.