Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks.  While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.  A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him.  He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.  Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad.  Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly: 

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta?  Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.  But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand.  He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself.  Her hand was warm and moist:  it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning.

“It was in the winter,” she said, “about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave my grandmother’s and come up here to the convent.  And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn’t be let out, and his people in Oughterard were written to.  He was in decline, they said, or something like that.  I never knew rightly.”

She paused for a moment and sighed.

“Poor fellow,” she said.  “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy.  We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country.  He was going to study singing only for his health.  He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.”

“Well; and then?” asked Gabriel.

“And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then.”

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on: 

“Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’ Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window.  The window was so wet I couldn’t see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.”