there was no one to go with her, and he himself did not know what road to go, for he had never been out of his own country before the night he brought her away with him.
Nor had the priest any better knowledge than he; but when Guleesh asked him, he wrote three or four letters to the King of France, and gave them to buyers and sellers of wares, who used to be going from place to place across the sea; but they all went astray, and never one came to the king’s hand.
This was the way they were for many months, and Guleesh was falling deeper and deeper in love with her every day, and it was plain to himself and the priest that she liked him.
The boy feared greatly at last lest the king should really hear where his daughter was and take her back from himself, and he besought the priest to write no more, but to leave the matter to God.
So they passed the time for a year, until there came a day when Guleesh was lying by himself on the grass, on the last day of the last full month of autumn, and he thinking over again in his own mind of everything that happened to him from the day that he went with the fairies across the sea. He remembered then, suddenly, that it was one November night that he was standing at the gable of the house, when the whirlwind came, and the fairies in it, and he said to himself: “We have a November night again to-day, and I’ll stand in the same place I was in last year, until I see if the good people come again. Perhaps I might see or hear something that would be useful to me, and might bring back her talk again to Mary”—that was the name himself and the priest called the king’s daughter, for neither of them knew her right name. He told his intention to the priest, and the priest gave him his blessing.
Guleesh accordingly went to the old rath when the night was darkening, and he stood with his elbow leaning on
