BRIAN
(startled) Why do you say that?

MAIRE
I’m thinking that you were doing what would become you, Brian
MacConnell, with the free hand and the wild heart.

BRIAN
They were telling you about me?

MAIRE
I know you, Brian MacConnell.

BRIAN You don’t know how I care for you, or you couldn’t talk to me like that.  Many’s the time I left the spade in the ground, and went across the bogs and the rushes, to think of you.  You come between me and the work I’d be doing.  Ay, and if Heaven opened out before me, you would come between me and Heaven itself.

MAIRE
It’s easy taking a girl’s heart.

BRIAN
And I long to have more than walls and a roof to offer you. 
I’d have jewels and gold for you.  I’d have ships on the sea for you.

MAIRE
It’s easy to take a girl’s heart with the words of a song.

BRIAN
I’m building a house for you, Maire.  I’m raising it day by day.

MAIRE
You left me long by myself.

BRIAN
It’s often I came to see the light in the window.

MAIRE
Brian, my father wants to go back to the roads.

  Brian goes and sits by her.

BRIAN
I know that Conn would like to go back.

MAIRE
He wants to go on the roads, to go by himself from place to
place.

BRIAN
Maybe he has the right to go.

MAIRE
He has the right to go.  It’s the life of a fiddler to be on
the roads.

BRIAN
But you won’t go on the roads.

MAIRE
Oh, what am I to do, Brian?

BRIAN
Do you think of me at all, Maire?

MAIRE
Indeed I think of you.  Until to-day I’d neither laugh nor cry
but on account of you.

BRIAN
I’m building a house, and it will be white and fine, and it’s
for you that I’m building the house.

MAIRE
You’re going to ask for my promise.

BRIAN
Give me your promise before you go to Ardagh.

  Maire rises.

MAIRE
If I gave you my promise now, I’d have great delight in coming
back to this place again.

BRIAN
You won’t deny me, my jewel of love?

MAIRE
Oh, I’m very fond of Aughnalee.  I feel that I was reared in
the place.  I’d like to live all my life in the place.

BRIAN
And why would you go from it?  MAIRE You might come with us to
Ardagh, Brian.

BRIAN
Your father might stay with us when he’d be in this country.

MAIRE
That’s true; I’m glad to think on that.

BRIAN
Give me your promise, Maire.

MAIRE
We’ll talk on the road.  There’s the blackbird.  I’ll hear him
every evening on the road, and I’ll think I’m a day nearer home.

BRIAN
Sure you’d leave them all to come with me.

MAIRE Ay, I think I would. (She takes up a new kerchief, and puts it on her, standing before the mirror) Do you know where I saw you first, Brian?