Nora [deeply mortified].  Was that all you used to be thinking about?

Larry.  Well, there was precious little else to think about here, my dear Nora, except sometimes at sunset, when one got maudlin and called Ireland Erin, and imagined one was remembering the days of old, and so forth. [He whistles Let Erin Remember].

Nora.  Did jever get a letter I wrote you last February?

Larry.  Oh yes; and I really intended to answer it.  But I haven’t had a moment; and I knew you wouldn’t mind.  You see, I am so afraid of boring you by writing about affairs you don’t understand and people you don’t know!  And yet what else have I to write about?  I begin a letter; and then I tear it up again.  The fact is, fond as we are of one another, Nora, we have so little in common—­I mean of course the things one can put in a letter—­ that correspondence is apt to become the hardest of hard work.

Nora.  Yes:  it’s hard for me to know anything about you if you never tell me anything.

Larry [pettishly].  Nora:  a man can’t sit down and write his life day by day when he’s tired enough with having lived it.

Nora.  I’m not blaming you.

Larry [looking at her with some concern].  You seem rather out of spirits. [Going closer to her, anxiously and tenderly] You haven’t got neuralgia, have you?

Nora.  No.

Larry [reassured].  I get a touch of it sometimes when I am below par. [absently, again strolling about] Yes, yes. [He begins to hum again, and soon breaks into articulate melody].

Though summer smiles on here for ever,
Though not a leaf falls from the tree,
Tell England I’ll forget her never,

[Nora puts dawn the knitting and stares at him].

     O wind that blows across the sea.

[With much expression]

Tell England I’ll forget her ne-e-e-e-ver
O wind that blows acro-oss—­

[Here the melody soars out of his range.  He continues falsetto, but changes the tune to Let Erin Remember].  I’m afraid I’m boring you, Nora, though you’re too kind to say so.

Nora.  Are you wanting to get back to England already?

Larry.  Not at all.  Not at all.

Nora.  That’s a queer song to sing to me if you’re not.

Larry.  The song!  Oh, it doesn’t mean anything:  it’s by a German Jew, like most English patriotic sentiment.  Never mind me, my dear:  go on with your work; and don’t let me bore you.

Nora [bitterly].  Rosscullen isn’t such a lively place that I am likely to be bored by you at our first talk together after eighteen years, though you don’t seem to have much to say to me after all.

Larry.  Eighteen years is a devilish long time, Nora.  Now if it had been eighteen minutes, or even eighteen months, we should be able to pick up the interrupted thread, and chatter like two magpies.  But as it is, I have simply nothing to say; and you seem to have less.