the dancing restarts, Kate pairs Gabriel with Molly Ivors, an Irish nationalist colleague of his. She chides Gabriel for writing for an English newspaper and not learning Irish, and in response, he declares he is sick of Ireland. While Gretta is attempting to persuade Gabriel that they should go on a summer trip to the Aran Islands that Molly mentioned, Kate announces that Julia is going to sing "Arrayed for the Bridal", an operatic piece from her "concert days". Despite her warbling voice, Freddy drunkenly gushes over the performance, and Kate complains about the Pope ending her sister's singing career in the church choir when he replaced the women with boys. When it is time to eat, Molly leaves the party to attend a union meeting. During the sumptuous feast, conversation topics range from opera to morality. Freddy reliably utters the wrong things, but despite his nerves, Gabriel gives a rousing speech praising the wonderful Irish hospitality shown by Kate, Julia and Mary Jane. As the guests are leaving, Mrs. Malins asks Gabriel to look after Freddy when she returns to Scotland, and Gabriel awakens Mr. Brown and puts him in a carriage with the Malins. When almost everyone is gone, Bartell D’Arcy, a "celebrated tenor" who had not sung anything all evening, sings "The Lass of Aughrim" to Miss O'Callaghan, and Gabriel watches Gretta as she listens transfixed from the stairs. Her pensiveness continues in the carriage on the way to the hotel where she and Gabriel are staying the night, and she dismisses Gabriel's attempts to cheer her. In their hotel room, Gabriel asks Gretta what she is thinking, and she explains that when she was young and lived with her grandmother in Galway, a boy she knew named Michael Furey used to sing "The Lass of Aughrim". She says she feels responsible for his death at age seventeen as, on the night before she returned to the convent in Dublin where she went to school, Michael left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye, and he died a week later. Gretta cries herself to sleep, and Gabriel thinks that he has never felt love like the love Michael must have felt for Gretta and that it is better to die young and passionate than to wither and fade away like Julia, and presumably he will. Looking out the