Michael Furey’s final visit and death emerge through Gretta Conroy’s recollection, not through a scene narrated from Furey’s point of view. Her account turns a song heard in the present into the trace of a youthful love: ill and forbidden to see her, Furey came to her grandmother’s garden on the wet night before she left Galway for Dublin. He went home at her urging, but died about a week later. The revelation unsettles Gabriel Conroy’s hoped-for intimacy and forces him to confront a past in Gretta’s life that he had not known.

The Memory Is Awakened

The recollection follows Gretta’s response to “The Lass of Aughrim,” a song Furey used to sing. When Gabriel asks ironically whether she had been in love with someone, she identifies him as a young boy she once knew and calls him delicate. She remembers his big, dark eyes and their expression. Her attention is fixed on the vividness of his remembered presence; Gabriel, by contrast, falls silent and does not want her to think he is interested in Furey.

The mismatch between them deepens when Gretta says that she thinks Furey died for her. Gabriel feels a vague terror, as if an unseen, vindictive presence were gathering against him at the moment he had expected to triumph. The story gives that reaction a clear dramatic cause: Gretta’s memories have replaced the intimacy Gabriel was trying to initiate with a grief and attachment he cannot command. He shakes off his fear by an effort of reason, continues to caress her hand, and stops questioning her, sensing that she will tell him what happened.

Illness and Separation

Gretta places the events in the winter, near the time she was to leave her grandmother’s house and go to a convent in Dublin. Furey was ill in lodgings in Galway and was not allowed out; word was sent to his family in Oughterard. People said he had consumption, or something like it, but Gretta admits she never knew exactly what his illness was. The account preserves that uncertainty rather than supplying a diagnosis.

The two had gone walking together in the country. Furey intended to study singing for the sake of his health and, as Gretta recalls, had a very good voice. When the time came for her to leave Galway, he was much worse and she was not permitted to visit him. She wrote to say she was going to Dublin and would return in summer, hoping he would be better by then. The letter offered a future meeting, but the illness and separation made that hope precarious.

The Visit in the Rain

On the night before Gretta left, she was packing at her grandmother’s house on Nuns’ Island. She heard gravel thrown against the window, but the glass was so wet that she could not see outside. She ran downstairs as she was and slipped out through the back into the garden. At the far end, Furey stood shivering. The remembered encounter is brief and concrete: a wet window, the sound of gravel, a hurried departure into the garden, and the sick young man waiting by the wall near a tree.

Gretta implored him to go home at once, warning that he would catch his death in the rain. He told her he did not want to live. Although he went home, the words remain inseparable from the fatal outcome she recounts. Her insistence that she can still see his eyes makes the visit persist as an image, not merely as a link in a chronology. The recollection does not claim that Furey deliberately caused his own death; it records what he said, the danger of his illness, and the finality of his appearance in the garden.

Death and Its Aftermath

Gretta says Furey died when she had been at the convent only a week. He was buried in Oughterard, where his family came from. She recalls the day she learned of his death with a cry of grief, then stops speaking, chokes with sobs, and throws herself face down on the bed, weeping into the quilt. The narrative thus makes the revelation’s consequence immediate: this is not a detached anecdote for Gretta but a loss that returns with force as she tells it.

Gabriel holds her hand for a moment, irresolute, then lets it fall gently because he is shy of intruding on her grief. He walks quietly to the window; by the time he turns back, Gretta is asleep. The shift from his attempted caress to his withdrawal marks the collapse of the scene he had anticipated. Furey’s story changes the meaning of Gabriel’s touch: Gretta’s hand has not responded, and her emotional life has moved toward the memory she is disclosing.

Narrative Significance

The event is a remembered episode disclosed in conversation, with Gretta as its narrator. Its setting and sequence are supplied through her speech, while the enclosing scene shows Gabriel listening and registering what the memory does to his expectations. This structure leaves Furey absent in the present but gives him force through song, recalled eyes, and the story of his visit. The reader learns of him at the same moment Gabriel does, so the revelation changes both the apparent history of Gretta’s youth and the emotional balance between the married couple.

The account also holds together tenderness and uncertainty. Gretta remembers Furey as gentle, fond of her, and gifted in song, yet she cannot name his illness with precision. She says he died for her, but the facts she provides are that he was gravely ill, appeared in the rain, said he did not want to live, returned home, and died shortly afterward. That gap between her emotionally charged understanding and the incomplete medical explanation is part of the episode’s meaning: the past is vivid in its decisive images, but not fully recoverable. Furey’s death, disclosed after the song summons his memory, becomes the force that displaces Gabriel’s anticipated triumph and leaves him quietly at the window while Gretta sleeps.