The Passionate Crime
Author: Thurston, Ernest Temple
Date: 2016-05-24T05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Ebook prepared by crutledge@knology.net
Rights: Public Domain

TABLE of CONTENTS

PART I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

PART II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

ENDNOTES

PART I

CHAPTER I

WHO, if any, I wonder, knows the true history of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine? Do I really know it myself? Some of that which I heard was told me by an old woman up in the mountains near Clogheen. This was not so many miles from where they took Anthony Sorel, therefore I persuaded myself that she would be as likely as any to have the truth. Moreover there was something in the telling of it, something in the atmosphere that surrounded her in her lonely cottage on that wild mountainside—you must know well what I mean—which brought conviction to me.

This little hovel of hers stood in the scant shelter of a cluster of mountain ash, only a few hundred yards from die road that winds its silent and lonely way through a pass of the hills.

Down that pass, the whole winter long the wind drives the beaten rain, an endless herd of raindrops, swelling the brown mountain streams as they froth and fume over the bowlders. For ever they are making cascades and waterfalls, these little streams. Sometimes the mountain land offers them a hollow wherein they swirl into an eddying pool. They look so deep those pools. A mountain pool, a mountain lake—who would not believe in faeries, standing by the edge of one of these!

This was where the old woman lived who told me the story of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. She knew everything, this old woman. It was as though, in that miserable hovel of hers, many and many a mile from any place of habitation, it was as though she heard, by some miracle, all the gossip of the big world. I felt she knew far more than she wished to tell. From whom did she get her knowledge? That road from Clogheen across the mountains, seems the loneliest road in the world. For miles along its uneven surface, you may walk and walk seeing never a soul, or just a herdsman perhaps, driving his cattle to a distant farm.

Yet I suppose the whole of the world, die world of those parts, goes by that way. There is no other road I know of bearing to die south. And I can well imagine the rush of joy that leaps up in the heart of a traveler when, out of the lashing sheets of mist and rain, he sees through the gray darkness, the candle glimmering in her tiny window.

Why do I say “imagine”? I know well, without a call upon my fancy, the joy I felt when first I saw that candle-light.

Coming from Clogheen and nine long miles along die road, with five and more still stretched before me, I found the mist of the rain bearing with pin pricks on my face. It was difficult to keep my eyes open. My clothes were drenched, the water dripping in collected drops from the edges of my sleeves and slowly draining from die sodden collar of my coat. In the dim light, I could see the mountain sheep, clinging under the shelter of the rocks, their backs turned to the driving wind.

How many more miles? What hour of night could I hope to reach my destination? My pace had fallen to three miles an hour. How many more miles? And then that little orange chink of light through the ash trees—the sight of the glimmering window—still more the quiver of trembling light within that told its promise of a cheerful fire of wood and peat. That rush of joy, I felt then.

I stepped off the road, staggering and stumbling through the sodden marsh land. The water soaked into my boots with squelching noises that seemed to suck the last warm drop of blood out of my veins.

I knocked at the door and heard a grunt within —a human grunt that spoke in volumes of a deep suspicion. Would she open to me? Would I open to the first sound of a knock upon the door on such a night, if I lived in those lonely mountains?

All fell silent and I knocked again.

Then I heard footsteps shuffling within—still a suspicious sound, giving me no assurance of the welcome that I needed. They slowly approached the door. With the slow unbolting of a latch, it was opened an inch. The wind seized it and against her body blew it open still further. There was die old woman. Like an animal’s, accustomed to the light, her face peered out blindly into the darkness.

“Can you give me shelter?” said I.

She paused in curious inquisitiveness before she answered.

“Shelter-?” I repeated.

“Is it coming from Clogheen, ye are?” she asked gruffly.

I said I was.

“What a fool ye are,” said she—“wid the night on top av ye, an’ ye in yeer little coat.”

I explained that it was a fine sunset when I started and did not promise for rain. But still she held the door against the wind and made no movement to suggest that she would take me in.

“Now I’m drenched to the skin," I went on—“I can’t get to Cappoquin to-night.”

“There’d be a corpse to be buried if ye did,” said she, and either it was the slow relenting of her determination or it was the wind, but the door yielded another inch against her body.

“Could I just come in and dry my clothes by the fire?” I pleaded. “The rain may stop soon.”

Perhaps it was my pitiable ignorance of the weather’s ways in this part of the world that made her fully relent, for at that she let the wind take the door and swing it wide upon its hinges. I hurried into the little room and she closed out the night behind me.

It was a one-roomed cottage. There are so many in the wild parts of Ireland. The floor was of mud, caked and hard—dirty it is true—but warm and welcome enough then. The fire burned brightly on the floor under the open chimney—the glowing peat and crackling faggots were laid on two slabs of stone. They would long have burnt deep into the floor unless.

Without seeming too curious, I looked around me. It must have been such a cottage as this in which Anthony Sorel had lived. There was just a bed, a table beneath the little window, a dresser of painted deal upon which more of the blue and white plates were broken than were whole. The lower cupboards of this dresser were barred with strips of wood, as a cage. There she kept her chickens. Sometimes to a noise in the room, they shifted on their perches, making raucous sounds as though annoyed at the disturbance. For the most part they were quiet company though, but none too clean. The floor was soiled with them. Even a chair that stood against the wall bore marks of their existence in the room. The old woman had long lost all sense of tidiness.

Realizing the solitude of her life there alone, I scarcely wondered at it. It is the social instinct that tends to make us regard the cleanliness and well-seeming of the body. When we are surrounded by the loneliness of life, it is the mind we live with. Almost it is as though the body ceases to exist This is much what Anthony Sorel believed.

As soon as she had closed the door, the old woman pulled up the chair from against the wall and set it by the fire. The invitation for me to be seated was a silent one. When she sat down herself on the three-legged stool near the bellows-wheel, I sat down on the chair.

For the moment, while we were silent, I glanced at the bed. No better description of it can I give than by saying it was four-posted, yet it seemed to be built into the wall; to be part of the room itself. The bed-clothes were indescribable—dirty and disordered. The outer cover of the clothes might well have been a horse-blanket, but stained and long since indistinguishable from the thing it once had been. What clothes there were beneath it, I could not see. Indeed I felt I did not wish to know.

But it was the odor of that room which first and most of all revolted me. I find it impossible to describe. So many scents were mingled there—the smell of peat, the burning wood, aromatic and delightful enough in themselves, but mixed with the smell of the chickens, the close atmosphere, my own damp clothes perhaps as well and God knows what odor from the old woman herself, they all combined to offend my nostrils and stifle the breath in my throat. It was like air out of which all the goodness and the cleanliness had been breathed; it was heavy, tired, as the smell of flowers that have stood long dead in water no one ever changed. And there outside was the dean wind, leaving the scent of heather in a lingering suspension as it rushed along the mountainside.

It is strange though how quickly one’s senses become accustomed to the things which just a contrast makes unendurable. In a few moments, the warm atmosphere had taken the chill out of my blood and only the smell of the peat was conscious to my mind as I sat there.

Outside the wind whistled and it howled. It flung the rain like grains of sand against the window-pane; it rattled the door on its old hinges and threw the raindrops down the chimney, spitting into the fire. Never did it seem I had known such a night.

I said as much, hoping to make conversation, for though odd moments I could see the old woman was taking cunning glances at me, yet for the most part, she sat with her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands, staring into the fire.

She looked up as though she pitied me when I spoke about the rain.

“ ’Tis fine and soft,” said she and then, having once spoken, her curiosity got the better of her. She plied me with questions as to where I had come from, whence I was going; half ingenuous, half cunning questions as to who I was and what I was doing in that part of the world.

I pulled a book out of the little parcel of things I was carrying and gave it into her hand. She just looked at it as though it were a strange thing, being no answer to her question and then returned it to me.

“An’ what’s that?” said she.

“A book of poems—” I replied.

“An’ what’s the good o’ them to me and I can’t read,” said she.

“Can’t read at all?”

“There’s deuce a word I can read an’ ’tis over the shop windows, an’ painted out for me as large as meself. What’s poetry to me? What would I be doin’ readin’ in a place like this?"

I wished to conceal my astonishment. What could she do in a place like that if she did not read?

“Have you never heard any poetry at all?” I asked.

“Oh—I have indeed,” she replied quickly— “Haven’t we a gleeman in these parts, an’ he as blind, he couldn’t find the door, till the wind blew in through the crack of ut.”

I asked her if she liked poetry, to which she replied she did—“Well enough,” she added—“when there’s a lilt, ye could set yeer feet to ut.”

I opened the book at random and I read out—

“There is a wind that speeds across
The mountain heather and the moss,
And you alone will know the loss
If it has never found you.<

It tunes the harp strings in the trees
That play their muted minstrelsies
Which fairies dance to on the leas,
Around and all around you.”

I had scarcely finished the last word before her elbows dropped off her knees and her eyes were dancing in the fire-light with excitement.

“Shure, glory be I” she exclaimed—“wouldn’t I know that as well as I’d know my own name I Wasn’t ut up in the mountains here, away up there by Knockshunahallion, that Anthony Sorel drew all thim words down wid a lead pin on bits of paper.”

A lead pin! She meant with a pencil. But it was not the quaintness of this expression that caught my interest. She, who had never read a written word in her life, knew, at first hearing, the author of the verse I had read her! There was scarcely one in England who could have told me by whom those lines were written.

There she lived in that part of the world, where the obscure fate of Anthony Sorel had woven its completion on the loom whereon all men’s lives are spun. Knockshunahallion, so I calculated, was only four or five miles away, but they were miles of wildest Irish mountain land, where there is scarce a man and never a woman who would walk them after sunset when once the night had fallen.

Readily as her knowledge was to be accounted for, it surprised me nevertheless. For this was my mission, to learn the truth of the story concerning Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine. Not one in England could tell it me, beyond what had happened to filter through from the Irish papers at the time. And that was well-nigh twenty years ago. A few there were who had heard his name. Still fewer knew that he was a poet. There was scarce one who had read his verse.

His work, when all of it was collected, only made a small volume—that volume which I carried with me in the knapsack on my shoulder. It had been published by a man in Dublin who had been dead some years and the book itself had long since gone out of print. The volume which I possess, I picked up on a bookstall in London, before Atdwych and the Kingsway ever existed and Booksellers’ Row was that corner of the Romance of men’s thoughts which has long crumbled into the dust.

First I read the book, strangely attracted to the verses it contained, strangely attracted by the beauty of their imagery and mysticism. Some I could not understand at all. Yet, even without the benefit of understanding, one felt conscious of their overwhelming beauty.

I began to make inquiries about the life of Anthony Sorel. Who was he? Where did he live? Where was he born? His intimate knowledge of the folk and faerie lore of Ireland suggested indeed that he lived there. I asked. But no one knew.

Two years went by before I discovered an old bookseller in Notting Hill who could answer my questions and then with no degree of assurance.

“Anthony Sorel?” he said. “You mean him that killed that woman—killed that woman—Oh—I forget her name.”

“Killed a woman?” I said aghast—“the man who wrote those poems?”

“That’s it. Killed a woman.”

“How?”

“With his hands, I suppose. With a knife or something like that.”

“But why?”

“Ah—why does a man kill a woman, unless it’s because he hates her or loves her overmuch.”

“Are you sure of this?”

He nodded his head quite definitely.

“Was he hanged for it?”

“So I believe.”

“When did this happen?”

“Well—it must be twenty-odd years ago.” “Where?”

“In Ireland, they say.”

“Why doesn’t anybody know anything about it? For two years I’ve been asking people and you’re the first man who’s told me anything about it.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I know that much,” he said, “because I once had a book of his poems and a gentleman bought it from me, out of curiosity, he said. I remember his words at the time. ‘You don’t often find a poet and a murderer mixed up in one man,’ he said—and then he told me what I’ve just told you. He mentioned the name of the woman, but I can’t remember it.”

This much I learnt of Anthony Sorel from the old bookseller in Notting Hill. It was quite enough to rekindle my interest. I read all his poems again, thinking as the bookseller’s customer had thought,

“You don’t often find a poet and a murderer mixed up in one man.”

And every one of those poems I searched for one trace of that violence of passion which might show how he had been driven to such a deed, yet everywhere there was gentleness itself—a strange gentleness that almost seemed as if it were not of this world at all.

Only one couplet out of the many the book contained seemed to strike into my mind with a meaning I should not have dreamed of, if I had not heard his story.

Out of sorrow—out of pain,
You will find your soul again.
Seek it not with burning eyes
Where a starving passion lies.
Seek it not with quickening breath,
There it happens upon death.

Was it so he had happened upon death? Was jealousy the cause, that common cause through which so many men have lost the power and dignity of reason? I read every poem once again, searching in vain for allusion to the passion of jealousy. I could find nothing but that gentle imagery, that mystical aloofness as though, when once he had taken up his pen, imagination and a buoyant fancy had carried him into some other world than this.

I tried to forget the matter then, but again and again it kept recurring to my mind. You know that sensation when some unaccountable instinct prompts you to adventure. Every considered motive of common-sense urges you not to set forth upon a wild-goose chase, yet something deeper than your conscience bids you go. Something, voiceless, tells you that you are sacrificing the illimitable unknown for the petty certainty of what you know. Up and forth, that voiceless voice commands you and, if there is but the spirit of a fearless soul within you, you set out.

With spirit or without I went. The hunger of curiosity, if it were that alone, drove me to Ireland. From Dublin I took the train to Clogheen in Tipperary, the nearest point I could get to that part of the mountains where Anthony Sorel had lived. Then I set out on foot, with what adventure you have heard already.

Imagine then, when this old woman, living alone there in the heart of the mountains, imagine, when she mentioned the name of Anthony Sorel, how my heart leaped up. Already I felt that I was at the very gates of discovery.

“What do you know about Anthony Sorel?” I asked.

“Shure, what would I know indeed? ’Tis twenty years an’ more since he took the knife off av him an’ druv it into her soul, the way the blood was burstin’ out av both sides av her.”

“He did kill her then?”

Perhaps I had hoped there had been some miscarriage of justice, some terrible fault in the reckoning wherein he had kept silence for honor’s sake.

‘‘Is it kill her?" she replied. “Shure didn’t they find her body out there on the heather, with her eyes turned up to the stars and the wind tossing her hair about, an’ she dressed like a peasant woman, the way I’d be myself."

“Was he there beside her?"

“He was not. They found him when two days had gone, sitting by the lake up there in the mountains, he with no food in his stomach at all an’ just gazin’ into the water, the way he’d be waiting for them on May Eve."

By “them," I knew she meant the faeries.

“He was mad, then, was he?” I asked.

“Mad? Is ut mad? Shure they asked himself down there in the Court House in Cork was he mad and didn’t he up and say to the judge, ‘Them’s mad,’ says he, ‘as looks for justice the way they’d hunt for a shillin’ under a shtone.’ ’Twas himself said that to the judge. Shure, he was not mad at all. Yirra, there are some livin’ up in the mountains there now, can well remember him and they say that ’twas not himself that murdered the woman at all but ’twas the way the faeries took her. A man I know who says he’s seen Queen Maeve an’ milks a cow himself wid a broken leg to ut, he swears bi the saints he’s seen herself walking an’ she with the faeries down there in Foildarrig.’’

“Then he believes that Anthony Sorel was innocent?”

“He does indeed and he will believe it so as long as the goats make marbles.”

“Where did she live? What sort of a woman was she?”

“Is ut Anna Quartermaine?”

“Was that her name?”

“That was the name av her an’ she livin’ down at Ballysaggartmore in a great big house the size ye could put a whole army av min into ut.”

“Was she a lady then?”

“She was indeed, wid tin servants if ye plaze an’ they all hangin’ on the steps av her like a row av geese goin’ down to the water.”

“How did she come to be in peasant’s dress then up there in the mountains?”

I pressed my questions one quick upon the other, for the more I heard, the more my curiosity awakened; the more I felt the mysterious strangeness in this story that was growing before my eyes and at the very outset of my journey.

“How did she come to be in peasant’s clothes?” she repeated. “Shure how do ye come to be sitting here on my chair and ye cornin’ all the ways from London? Faith it just happened, I suppose, unless it was as they say beyond over, that the faeries had taken her then an’ all the tin servants in Ballysaggartmore were out huntin' the heather for her, an’ she passin’ by through the middle av them an’ not one to know who she was.”

“Do you think the faeries had taken her?” “Yirra, how would I know? There’s a man up there in Moonavaullagh and when last June was a year, the Amadhan got the shtroke av him an’ he walking over Scart bridge. He’s tellin’ wonderful tales now, but the earth’ll turn over before ever he sees the light of his wits again. Things happen.”

Having said that, she fell bade again into her former attitude, sitting there with her elbows on her knees, her hands covering her face, staring into the fire. And the wind howled outside and still the raindrops came spitting down the chimney. I thought of the lonely road I had just left, of the infinite stretches of mountain land drifting into the running mist and I had no wonder that these people could believe in strange happenings.

By her very attitude, I knew that either she had no more to tell me, or had fallen into that state of reverie peculiar to her race from which no power of mine could waken her. Still I plied her with one more question. I asked her if she could tell me where I might find the man who had known Anthony Sorel, the man who had seen Anna Quartermaine walking with the faeries in Foildarrig.

“Are ye a police officer?” she asked then with a cunning glance at my face.

I told her I was not.

“Then what’s on ye? What is ut ye’re after wanting to find wid the pore man?”

“I don’t want to find anything with him. I just want to try and make out why Anthony Sorel killed Anna Quartermaine.”

“There’s a man livin’ on Crow Hill knows that,” said she, “but he wouldn’t tell if God asked him in a little voice the way ye’d whisper a thing out av a child.”

“What’s his name?”

“He goes by the name of Malachi—”

“Malachi what?”

“Faith if he knew that, he might be claimin' himself out av the line of the kings of Ireland, he said.”

I stamped that name on my memory and then she would say no more. She sat in her reverie until the kettle boiled on the peat fire. In silence she made the pot of tea, pouring a cup out for me and a cup for herself. It was black. There was no milk, nor did I like to ask for any. The liquid was warm and comfortable. I felt thankful for that. Still in silence, she offered me a piece of dry griddle bread, baked in the ashes of the fire, the crust of it still gray where it had rested in the embers.

When the meal was finished she rose from her three-legged stool and, without divesting herself of a single garment, she climbed up into the bed and covered herself with the horse blanket.

“Ye can sleep there on the chair,” said she—“or ye can lie on the floor, if yeer skin’s not tinder an’ ye won’t mind the way the chicken fleas’ll be at ye.”

I said I would stay on the chair. So there I sat and, as the wind shook the door on its hinges, I said good night in my gratitude for the shelter she had given me.

She made no answer, but I could hear the beads clicking one by one between her fingers as she prayed herself to sleep.

CHAPTER II

THERE is little mysticism in England; the lives of people are almost destitute of imagination.

Perhaps it is so in all big cities and England, in most parts, is one big city now.

There are many who claim imagination, as, with more right no doubt, they claim a sense of humor. But their imaginings are prompted by experience. They imagine of the things that will be, from the things that have been. In Ireland they do not do that.

In Ireland they imagine of the things that will be and the things that are, not from what the past has taught them, but as if they turned their eyes to heaven and had seen strange visions or as if they looked out into the mist across the mountains and heard strange sounds no other man had heard before. There is that look in their eyes as in the eyes of a man who has just wakened out of sleep, not knowing which is more real, the world he lives in or the dream he has just dreamt. So they come easily to their belief in the faerie people.

I came next day to Crow Hill in search of Malachi and found him to be an old man with such a look in his eyes as that of which I speak.

He too lived in a one-roomed cottage that dung in lonely fashion to the side of Crow Hill. There you look upwards towards the summit of Knockshunahallion that pierces into the low-hanging clouds. In nearly all the seasons of the year, the mists are eddying round it, steeping the lonely paths of it in mystery.

There is always mystery in the thing you know of but cannot see. That is why mountains are so mysterious. There are but few days in the year when the peak of Knockshunahallion emerges into the clear sunlight and gives its face to the world. Then, as the people in those parts say, it is a woman, caught unawares as she looks at her reflection in a mirror. “She has the truth in her face to-day,” is what they say. But it is not as if it were the truth they desired. No one it seems would choose the truth from a woman. Mystery must envelop her. There the heart of her beauty lies. They are more at ease, more satisfied there on the mountainside, when the summit of Knockshunahallion is hidden in the misty vapors that conceal her face as a veil of gossamer conceals the eyes of a woman. So they know her best.

There are many of them afraid of the faeries in those parts; many of them who would not dare to venture forth after dark on the roads when it is May Eve. But that fear of the mysterious, that consciousness of the unseen and the unknown is so much a measure of their lives, that they would not be without it. It seems as if they would mistrust life unless.

When the old man Malachi opened the door to my knocking and I found him a withered creature some seventy years of age, dressed in a brilliant red shirt, a leather belt supporting on his limbs a pair of trousers of unbleached flannel, it was not these facts about him that I noted most. It was the look in his eyes. He thought I was a faerie man and dared not close the door in my face, neither dared he open it further and let me in.

As I learnt from him long before we parted, he had seen faerie people many times in his life. Once a black pig that had looked at him over the wall, then uttered cries like a dying child as it sped off into the darkness. That night, so he told me, a black hen of his died on the roost under the old dresser. It fell to the floor with its head severed from its body, yet no one had slept in the house that night but himself.

Again there was an old woman—dressed as the old women thereabouts are—who set a spell on his eyes and took him up into the mists of Knockshunahallion, showing him there a pit in the earth that looked down into the heart of the world and there he saw his mother in Hell. His mother had hanged herself from the lintel of the door when he was a boy, because her husband continually beat her until life was a sick thing in her heart. Malachi had found her hanging there with the face of her dull black, her lips swollen, her tongue hanging out on her cheek with the flies walking over it The priest had told him she was in Hell, because when a woman receives a beating at the hands of her husband, she must bear it patiently. It was the scourge of God upon Eve, the priest told him, and his mother had gone to Hell because she had taken her life to avoid it. He had pointed to the flies, saying that was a proof of where she was.

So the old woman had taken Malachi up into the mountains and shown him his mother in Hell and his mother had called out, asking him to take the fire out of her eyes, but when Malachi had made to climb down into the pit, the old woman had held him fast. He had closed his eyes and struggled with her, because he loved his mother much. Suddenly then, her resistance vanished. He opened his eyes and found himself standing knee-deep in the wet heather on the side of Knockshunahallion and the dawn was breaking out in red and gold over the ridges in the east. But the pit and the old woman had vanished. She was a faerie, he told me.

When I came to hear these things, I understood only too well that look in his eyes as he opened the door that day to me.

It was not easy with that expression, half of wonder, half of fear, to explain what I wanted of him then. Indeed I remembered the old woman on the Clogheen road; what she had said of him; how he knew about Anthony Sorel, but would not tell, not even if God asked him in a little voice—so she had put it—as you would try and whisper a thing out of a child.

For a moment then I was at loss to speak, but, swiftly gathering my wits together, I asked him if he knew of an inn in those parts where I could get lodging.

At that he came outside his house and dosed the door. There was the instinct of self-protection in the way he did it. It almost seemed as if he were relieved by the opportunity my question gave him of definitely keeping from me the shelter of his roof.

“If ye go down the road past Doon,” said he, “there’s wan bi the name av Foley keeps a public-house at Araglin. Himself has a room there he let to a foreigner last year.”

I smiled at his use of the word “foreigner.” Yet it is true enough, we are all foreigners to them. Although we both spoke the same tongue, I felt that he found me no less strange than I did him.

How was I ever to learn—it struck me then—how was I ever to learn from him a story, he would not tell even to God Himself? But that doubtless was her way of speaking. I did not wholly despair.

“How many miles is Araglin from here?” I asked.

“Well—it might be two and it might be three.” Now he was eyeing me more with simple and fearless curiosity. “If I’d be walkin’ it myself, I might find it was three.” He looked me up and down. “But ye’ve got the good legs on ye,” he added, as though the distance differed—as no doubt distance does—according to your power of covering it.

I have often thought that. There is the distance of the mind and there is the distance of the body. It is so with Time. What are clocks? One moment can be eternal.

“Do you often walk that distance?” I asked, seeking with every effort to draw him into some sort of conversation.

“Every Sunday to Mass.”

“There’s a chapel there?”

“There is.”

“Who’s your priest?”

“Father Dorgan. Sometimes we’d be havin’ Father Killery from Ballysaggartmore.”

I know my eyes must have lighted up at that.

“Ballysaggartmore,” I repeated—“that’s where Anna Quartermaine lived—isn’t it?”

He snatched a quick glance at me, quick and full of suspicion.

“How did ye hear tell of Anna Quartermaine?” he asked.

“Wasn’t it she who was murdered by Anthony Sorel?” I replied.

He turned his head away, looking up to the peak of Knockshunahallion where the mists were still floating after the night of rain. And then he spoke, not as if he were speaking to me, but with a far-off note in his voice as though he would cast it to the ears of a people in another world than this.

“Let them bring forth the seed of his body,” this was what he said, “but when a man do be walkin’ up and down in the mountains, the way a child hunts for shells at the strand of the sea, they’d destroy him entirely and they leanin’ out to take hold of the seed of his mind.”

I listened intently, but not one word had a meaning, save that of conjecture, to me. He spoke of women and with a bitterness and contempt you so often find amongst the men in the wildest parts of Ireland. Indeed the land is dearer to them far. It ' is the land and seldom a woman they leave behind them when they go into the far countries. It is not often their poets sing of women but of the land. Beauty in women is a snare. They mistrust it. Few of the evil spirits in that sad country are men.

A strange sexlessness inhabits the souls of the Irish people. Fierce as their passions are, they are more the passions of an excitable mind than of a susceptible body. So is the fame of Ireland world-wide for its virtue.

I looked at him as he spoke, wondering at the strangeness of his life, could I but know it all; comparing it with the lives of the men I knew in London, with my own life as well. He was a different being. It was not race that separated us, nor mode of living, neither habits, nor customs, nor language, so much as the whole structure of our minds. We are products of a modem civilization here; but in Ireland, with all the fervor of their Catholic faith, they are pagans, touching the truer meaning of things in all their mysticism and aloofness. It is they alone, amongst all the people of the West, who know the true value of life, who can appreciate the real momentary significance of death.

“Are you speaking of Anna Quartermaine?” I asked him. “Are you speaking of her when you say that?”

“I’m sayin’ nothing at all,” said he, “but what any man might be sayin’ wid his eyes turned inwards.”

I offered him my pouch of tobacco, but he shook his head, taking out of his pocket a roll of coarse twist from which, with an old knife, he proceeded to cut a piece off into the homy palm of his hand. This he thrust into a remote comer of his jaw and then spat upon the ground.

I watched the far-off expression in his face as he turned the quid in his mouth. It was true enough what the old woman on the Clogheen road had said. He would not tell his secrets even to God. How great a task then lay before me to persuade him to tell them to a foreigner!

I felt no object was to be gained then by staying there any longer. I must get him accustomed to talking to me before I could approach the subject of Anthony Sorel again. Those moments with him were only time wasted. He had been there in that cottage on the side of Crow Hill for forty years, so he told me—forty years off and on. He was not going to leave it then. I could visit him again. I determined accordingly to climb up there from Araglin every day—every day until I had wooed from his lips the story I had set myself to hear. I was confident then in the early moments of my quest. But little did I know how difficult it would be; how in the end, mere chance, rather than the power of my persuasion, would only wring it from him.

“Well,” said I, at last—“I suppose I’d better be moving on. Can I miss my way to Araglin from here?”

“The road’ll take ye,” said he—as if I were a child in its arms. “He has a fine room in the public-house there. I’ve heard tell ’tis an iron bed he has, wid knobs av gold on ut a man once tuk off an’ sold to a tinker for a wealth uv money. But himself got thim off av him when he’d a drop taken an’ they in the bag he had in his hand.”

I moved away, saying I would tell the publican who had recommended me to his inn. I said it thoughtlessly, supposing it might mean a drink for him when he was down that way. I mentioned his name.

“Who told ye I was named Malachi?” said he with quick suspicion, and I knew at once from the look in his eyes that I had raised an immediate barrier of apprehension in his mind.

“An old woman,” I replied—“on the road from Clogheen.”

“Wouldn’t I know ut!” he exclaimed. “Glory be to God—isn’t there more talk in a woman’s mouth than ye’d find lashins of fish in the sey?”

I closed my lips and said no more. There was nothing more to be said. A little bridle-path twisted down to the road I could see winding away to the moors in the distance. Down that I stepped and when I had reached the road, I looked back. He was standing as I had left him, outside his door, gazing after me with those little eyes screwed deep into his head, his red shirt flaming like a soldier’s coat against the deep green of the heather. He seemed like a mountain sentry, guarding the gates behind which lay that secret my heart was now set upon discovering.

CHAPTER III

IF you climb over the high moorland that rises straight up above Ballyduff and the river Blackwater, you will, after an hour’s rough walking, look down into the green vale of Araglin, through which the river of that name winds its way. Near and beyond it on the right rises the peak of Knockshunahallion, while to the left, another six miles away, across a valley fed by the river Funshion, stands Galtymoor, lifting its three thousand feet of deep blue mountain into the sky.

Not in any proper sense, of the word is Araglin a valley, but so steep rises the moor and mountain land about it that, as you look down, it seems like a hidden emerald in the cup of these giants’ hands.

They have a passion for names everywhere in Ireland—a passion moreover they know most poetically how to express. A cluster of white and pink-washed cottages, scarcely claiming the dignity of a street, will yet be given the honor of a name as though it were a village in itself. Such a place was Araglin in those days. I have no doubt it is just such a place to-day.

From the top of those moors, you could faintly see that handful of cottages like a cluster of pebbles in the bed of a stream. If of such a place you can speak of a population, then there were a hundred souls—no more.

A blacksmith with his forge was there. There was Foley, the publican. In one of the cottages lived a cobbler who followed a starving trade. Only the men at work in the fields and a few of the women wore boots that came to his last for the mending. There also stood alone, with all the dignity of a two-storied dwelling, the house where Father Dorgan lived at the time of which I write.

I have reason to speak of this house again, and may well describe it. Baggs’ House it was called, from an old man of that name who had built it There it had stood for sixty years and more, hidden away in a group of pine and oak trees. He had cared little for a view, it had seemed, still less for the open light of day. The oak trees must have been there for over a hundred years. He had merely cleared a space in the midst of them and there set down his dwelling-place. Though quite close to the rest of the cottages in Araglin, it was a lonely spot All through the winter days and nights, the rain dropped from the trees on to the gravel drive, then green with moss and the tufts of grass that grew up here and there. In summer it was little better. All the sky was shut out, even from the upper windows. The gaunt, big rooms with their high ceilings were filled with an indescribable gloom which even the light through the abnormally large windows could not disperse.

The walls were weather-slated to the ground.

The windows had gray shutters that once were white. The whole house seemed to have been built on land of marshy dampness. Everything about it exuded water. In the rooms the faded paper was peeling in places from the walls, the ceilings were discolored and cracked. The knocker on the hall door, the iron bell-handle at the side, the metal slit of the letter-box, the scraper on the ground, they were all rusty, and the moss grew even in the cracks of the great slab of stone that served as a doorstep.

Father Dorgan cared little enough for these signs of decay. He cared no more for the unenviable reputation that clung to his house itself. It was haunted, they said. There were those in Araglin —old people it is true, to whom maybe visions come easily—who had seen the ghost of Simon Baggs, with his full-bottomed coat and the stock about his neck, as he walked up and down from the front door of his house to the iron gate that opened on to the drive from the road.

I can well imagine the specter. I have approached that rusty black gate at night time, making my way to the house, and with but the gentlest flight of fancy could believe I saw between the twisted bars that square set face—so they describe him—the beetled brows behind which the little eyes shone cunning and dear. Often as I have waited on that moss-covered doorstep, waiting for the untidy servant to open the door to my ringing, I have almost felt con-scious of his presence in the dark avenue of trees. While the old bell has jangled through the hollow house to a heavy silence, I have almost believed I heard his footsteps on the sodden gravel drive and have waited with an unnatural eagerness for the door to be opened, giving me the warm comfort of the light within.

Here it was then that Father Dorgan lived, and from him, in that lofty dining-room of his, after his evening meal, when the fire was lighted and glasses of hot punch stood between lighted candles, steaming before us on the table, I learnt somewhat of Anthony Sorel, but not that secret for which I sought But before I can come to this part of my story, I must speak first of Foley’s public-house where I remained all the time I was at Araglin.

Tom Foley was not a prepossessing man. Like Simon Baggs’ house he needed the light of day. Malachi once said of him to me, “The sun never shines through the windows of his soul.” It was true. No one had ever seen him out in the open air. From the time he rose in the morning until the hour when he went to bed, he never crossed the threshold of his bar parlor. There he took his meals; there he sat all day and talked and was never wanting for company.

I found him that morning leaning over the bar in the parlor, his bloodless face quite expressionless as he listened to the conversation of three men. One was the driver of a donkey butt which, with its load of glittering sprats, he had driven all the way from Ardmore. It was standing outside the door as I came in. The two other men were laborers from the fields, the earth thick-caked upon their boots.

As I entered, the man from Ardmore was describing a haul of mackerel he had seen the fishermen make in Ardmore Bay. All the wealth of language and richness of exaggeration by which in Ireland they do make speech so real a thing, was swelling from his lips.

“The gulls had been cruishting outside all day,” he was saying—“an bi evenin’, there they were in the bay, lashin’ the water, an’ it black wid the tails av thim and they turnin’ over an’ over—shure couldn’t I see thim myself, glitterin’ there like a woman’s body an’ she buried in jools, the way Shaw-neen, whin he made the gold in America, tuk one o’ thim bad women and drowned her in pearls.”

As though suddenly aware of the presence of a stranger, his voice dropped on the last words almost to a whisper. He stopped speaking and they all turned round.

“A man named Malachi,” said I—“on Crow Hill, told me you had a room here where I could put up for a night or two.”

“Is ut the man who has great talk about the faeries?” asked the one who came from Ardmore. “Him havin’ the story of the old woman who showed him his mother, an’ she burnin’ in Hell?”

“Is ut the old fella beyond, wearin’ a red shirt he got off a tinker woman cornin’ out of Dingarvin?”

They all asked questions about Malachi. Not one of them seemed concerned with what I wanted, least of all the publican himself.

When I had satisfied them who my informant was, I inquired of Foley if it were true he had a room to let.

“I have indeed,” said he, but made no movement to show me where it was or to get to business. He still leaned there over the dirty counter of his bar and stared at me with curious eyes. The others drank their porter and stared at me as welL

“Well—could I see it?” I inquired.

“Ye cannot,” said he.

“It’s not to let then?”

“It is indeed—shure aren’t I just after sayin’ so.”

“Well,” said I—“I should like to see it if I could.”

“An’ I’m tellin’ ye, ye can’t,” he replied.

“Why not?”

“Because there’s an old sow been havin’ a litter of fourteen there last week and the good ’ooman has not had the inclination to tidy up the place since. I’ll set herself on to ut now and 'twill be ready for ye in an hour’s time.”

It was not a cheerful prospect, but I had to make myself content with it. No other place was possible in Araglin and whatever it proved to be, I knew I should have to be satisfied.

The building itself was long, low and one-storied. No painted sign was there outside to attract the unsuspecting traveler. Doubtless it once had been a row of cottages and, with the monopoly of the trade, had grown into one establishment.

Father Dorgan’s was the only two-storied house in the neighborhood. Even the constabulary where the two policemen dwelt, was a thatched cottage, rising not more than one floor from the ground.

For that hour, whilst the good woman was overcoming her disinclination to tidiness and my room was being made ready for me, I wandered about the village.

On the banks of the river Araglin, I found the whole constabulary, the two policemen, responsible for law and order, Ashing for trout in the brown waters of that little rushing stream. Both eyed me, not with suspicion, but with a candid, village curiosity. Araglin sees few travelers. Few strangers ever come that way.

A little further on beyond the village, I saw the flgure of a priest walking before me on the same bank of the river. I knew it must be Father Dorgan. He was reading his morning office, but before I came up with him, the task was Anished. I saw him put the book away in his pocket.

Here was a man, I thought, who no doubt could help me in my quest. The parish priest in Ireland knows his people as well as he knows the well-thumbed pages of his breviary.

"Good morning, father,” said I.

He turned more quickly than seemed natural to his mood at the sound of a strange voice.

“Good mqming to ye,” said he and immediately his curiosity got the better of him. “You’re a stranger in these parts,” he added.

I was, I told him. I said at once I came from London.

“ ’Tis a great place,” said he. “Is ut the way ye’re goin’ to Ballyduff over for the fishin’ ?”

“No,” said I—“I’m not a fisherman. I’m just going to stay for a bit at the inn here, if they can put me up.”

“Oh—shure, Foley’ll see to that,” said he with a humorous knowledge of the man. “He’d put up the King himself an’ feed him on ham an’ eggs rather than miss a bit of money.”

I felt in the way he said it, that he had spoken of the King for my benefit, to please me because he knew I was an Englishman. Had I been one with a brogue from Dublin, he would have spoken of the Pope, maybe.

In swift moments during the silence that followed, I stole quick glances at him while we walked together, just as I knew he was taking his stock of me.

He was a thin, spare man. Large-boned he was, with big, nervous-looking hands and high cheek bones, throwing deep shadows into the hollows below. His eyes were gray and set far back beneath the overhanging brows. He gave me the impression that he fasted often and was given much to the chastisement of his body and his soul. I could imagine him, like monks of old, inflicting upon himself the pains of flagellation, beating himself as he said his prayers.

What he found in me, I cannot say, but without conceit, I think I am right in believing that from the moment of our short conversation that morning, he took a quiet fancy to me.

“How long are ye goin’ to stay in Araglin?” he asked me presently.

I admitted the truth. I did not know. It all depended so much upon the success of my quest.

“And shure what brought ye to this shtrip of God’s earth?” said he, smiling, it seemed to me, in order to conceal his curiosity.

“I was told I should find an inn here where I could put up.”

“Who told ye?”

“An old man up in the mountains there—a man named Malachi.”

“Malachi—living on Crow Hill! Glory be to God, shure there’s a strange wan for ye! Ye don’t find the likes of him walking down the Shtrand in London.”

I laughed.

“He’s an interesting old man,” said I.

Father Dorgan’s face assumed a serious expression. His eyes, as Malachi had said to me, in that moment were looking inwards.

“Away in the mountains here,” he said presently —“and in all the mountains in the west, ye’ll find many a man like Malachi. Yeer advanced doctor, he’d say they were mad. Shure, bring them down into the cities and ’tis mad they are. But up there in the mists, in their lonely cottages, there’s a queer kind of wisdom about thim, the way they’d know things it ’ud seem strange for any human man to get a hold of. He's traveled, mind ye, that old man. Many’s the season he's been harvesting in Wales across the water. There's not a word he can read or can write, but he'll tell ye tales he might have ransacked the libraries of Europe for, if ye’ll give him a drop of whisky to warm up the blood in his veins. Oh—shure he’s mad and there are times, mind ye, when I’d be as mad meself if by that I could see the things he has the power of seeing.”

“What things?”

I was as ready to be curious as he. For it was not only what he said, but the lowering of his voice to a note of suggestive suppression my ears were only too eager to receive.

When he did not answer, I asked again.

“What things?”

He looked up at me with a slow smile—a smile, characteristic of him, which never seemed really to fulfill its first intention, but died away before it had suggested laughter.

“Have ye ever been to this country before?” he inquired.

“Yes,” said I.

“But ye live in London?”

“Yes.”

“Well—there’s not much ye’d understand if I were to tell ye a half of the things that old man can see with his two eyes shut”

“Do you fancy me incapable of thinking that those are the things worth seeing?” I asked.

He stopped a moment as we walked and stood gazing across at the mountains, then turned sharply and looked at me.

“Ye do think that?”

“I do,” said I, falling easily into that habit of speech in Ireland which neither allows of yes or no.

“Come round one evening while ye’re here,” said he—“an’ have a talk with me. Just drop in.”

By now we were standing on the rough stone bridge that spans the river, carrying the road from the south up into the mountains. Before I had time to thank him for the invitation, he had left me. With long, slouching paces he was striding up the road, his head dropped between his shoulders as one-, not only who thinks and reads, but carries his thoughts with him wherever he goes.

CHAPTER IV

IN an hour’s time the room at Foley’s was ready for me, Mrs. Foley herself took me in charge and brought me to the door of it, explaining in a ceaseless flow of conversation how it was not usual for them to have strangers coming that way for whom they had to prepare the room at a moment’s notice.

Indeed that sudden preparation had put her in none the best of tempers. She was prepared for immediate aggression. I was obliged to pick my words. As she flung open the door, she gave me to understand that if by word or look I showed I did not like the room—always the room, as though it were a state apartment—then I might go elsewhere and waste no time about it.

But—“ ’tis aiqual to the deuce,” said she— “whether ye like it or not.”

This was what she said as she flung open the door. It was, I felt sure, a sensitive apprehension that brought about this aggressiveness in her. I was English. For all she knew I might be accustomed to the most luxurious style of living and were I to express an opinion reflecting upon her pride, she would no longer have had any occasion for me.

This is the pride of all these people. Poor, untidy, wanting even in cleanliness and with no possessions of which to boast, they are yet intensely proud—kings and queens of an impoverished monarchy. So far as one can find justification for it, it is true pride; not that of purse or of possession, but a pride in themselves and always apprehensive of injury.

She stood there regarding me in readiness for a rebuff as I looked round the room. There was the bed Malachi had spoken of, doubtless an inspiring piece of furniture to them in Araglin, though I could not believe how anyone had ever found it worth while to steal those lacquered brass knobs that adorned it. A piece of carpet, threadbare and long worn in holes, partly covered the floor. The washstand, the dressing-table, the chest of drawers, they were of plain varnished deal. There was no fireplace. Above the window hung tattered lace curtains, in places rent, with jagged edges. There was no blind.

“Well—this will do splendidly,” said I—“it’s an excellent bed.”

“ ’Tis a feather mattrass,” said she more genially. “Shure, ’twas I brought it out of Dingarvin whin I was married to himself.”

“I’m sure it’ll be very comfortable,” I replied amiably.

“Well—it is then. Haven’t I slept on it times and again whin himself had a drop taken an’ he kickin’ me out av me own bed. They say ’tis the way thim mattrasses do be harborin’ the insects, shure I wouldn’t believe it at all. It wasn’t many I found on that wan and there am I tellin’ ye now.”

I thanked her for her candid information as best I could and thereby made another friend in Araglin. Once having passed the ordeal of my approval, she became kindness itself. There was nothing that she would not do for me. Indeed for many a long day shall I carry in my mind the memory of Mrs. Tom Foley. She was a buxom woman, though energetic enough, with all the abundance of flesh God had given her to carry. Her little eyes, half opened, as though at birth the eyelids had never properly been parted, were full of twinkling good humor. She was, I think, the plainest woman I have ever seen. Those little eyes of hers, so crudely set beneath a shapeless forehead, were like the eyes of a pig, half mischievous, half cunning. Her voice was the most raucous thing in women I have ever heard. To add to the penetrating power of it, it was high pitched and, as one who drives in nails, she hammered it relentlessly upon your ears.

But with all these disadvantages, she was a homely creature, given to gossip as all of them are, to spiteful gossip when her temper was roused; but a good friend and generous with it all to those who found favor in her eyes.

I have taken some pains to describe her because if there is such a thing as the practical aspect of life in Ireland, it is women like Mrs. Tom Foley who represent it. She stands out in my mind in violent contrast to the lonely figure of that old man up in the mountains, even to the quiet figure of Father Dorgan who, had it not been for his faith, would have been as much a visionary as any.

Greatly as all this may seem to be digressive, it is in reality no departure from my story. Conditions of life in Araglin then, were much the same as when Anthony Sorel lived in his little one-roomed cottage on the side of Knockshunahallion and came down the mountain road into the village to buy such food as he needed.

As I have heard from all those who saw him, it was often only bread he bought Cronin was the baker in those days, but he had been dead some many years, the cottage and little bakehouse passing into the hands of Wolsey, his successor.

But even on that first day of my arrival, I found one, an ex-policeman, living on his pension in a little cottage at the end of the village, who had seen Anthony Sorel many times on those occasions when he came down from the mountains.

From him I received my first description of Anthony Sorel’s appearance. Together with other sources of information, I have pieced together a picture in my mind, the accuracy of which I, at least, am content with.

At the time that he must first have met Anna Quartermaine, he was still a young man, not more than thirty-seven at the utmost “But I’ve seen older men with less years on their backs,” said the ex-sergeant, describing the appearance of his age to me.

I can quite understand how he did not carry him self to the full height of his five foot eleven. This exact measurement I had on good authority. He was not a small man. But what I have said of Father Dorgan, could doubly have applied to Anthony Sorel. His thoughts, his imaginations, his belief in faeries, these alone he lived with, carrying them with him wherever he went. His figure too was slim, not exactly wasted in any sense, but with that slightness of body which tells of an ever-consuming fire within.

“ ’Twas himself burnt the candle of his soul,” one old man said to me and well I can understand the expressiveness of that phrase.

The color of him was dark, his black hair, as one may well suppose with such limited conveniences as Araglin could afford, untidy, long even, and unkempt. The tone of his skin was pale, no color in his cheeks; but not as in one who suffers from ill-health.

“Is ut suffer wid his health,” said one to me— “an’ he livin’ like a goat on the side of the mountains?”

I can quite believe he was strong and healthy enough. That burning candle of his soul consumed the heat of blood in him. Our country people in England, living such open lives as this, have no emotions of the mind upon which their blood may spend its warmth. Their cheeks are apple red. They go to their sleep at nights with easy souls and minds untroubled by the lightless skies. It is not this way with those who live in such fashion in Ireland. There was not one of those people in the mountains, unless here a young girl or there a young man, who showed a pair of rosy cheeks all weather-burnt with glowing health. Yet they are strong enough and perhaps a thousand times more tenacious of life.

This I imagine was the condition of Anthony Sorel. Because his cheeks were thin and pale, I do not suppose him one of fragile health. I have seen the cottage, now roofless and windowless, where he lived and there, in the teeth of the countless winds of God’s heavens, it would have been hard for any man to have suffered in his body and have lived.

His eyes, they told me, these were the most striking feature he possessed, and that I can imagine well. Some eyes are dull and almost lifeless; some sparkle to the healthy blood that rushes through the veins. There are eyes that shine, all brilliant with their own intelligence. But the eyes of Anthony Sorel held never the same light from one day to another. They burnt as they looked outwards. They slumbered as they gazed within.

“I’ve seen him look,” the old sergeant said to me—“the way ye’d think he was pickin’ the soul out av ye wid the point of a pin; an’ I’ve seen him look, the way ye’d feel ye might be gone, dead and buried, for all he’d know ye were there at all.”

From such descriptions as these it is, that I have gathered and pieced together in my mind a picture of Anthony Sorel, convincing enough, indeed indelible to me.

His forehead may have been high, but that black hair in loosened locks mostly covered it. I do not imagine his face to have been of that order one speaks of as intelligent. It was long from the eyes to the chin. The mouth was so sensitive, I can well conceive of the temerity of those who spoke with him. But it was a wonderful face, they have told me. Tenderness and understanding were all alive in it when his mind was not occupied with that mysterious aloofness which seemed to erect an insurmountable barrier between himself and those with whom he came in contact.

One interesting thing, the old sergeant said to me. In all the investigations I made regarding the life and death of Anthony Sorel in Ireland, I remembered it best of alL

“What was on him at all,” said he, “for him to be takin’ the knife to her? Shure he wouldn’t have taken a green linnet out of its nest—that was the way wid him.”

Unhappily it must be said that amongst the Irish people, kindness to animals and birds is the extreme proof of gentleness. In those parts—I cannot speak of others—they think nothing of taking a linnet from its nest as it sits bravely and fearlessly upon the eggs. Once caught, they put it in a cage using it as a snare to catch its mate. It would even amaze them to hear that that was cruelty.

The sergeant truly thought him a gentle creature when he admitted that.

“It was with a knife he killed her then?” I asked.

“Shure it was av course and he with fingers like the strings av Patsy Troy’s fiddle, the way ye’d think they could speak if they touched ye. Faith if he took hold of a bubble, he wouldn’t break ut”

This was another little feature to add to my mind portrait of Anthony Sorel. Fingers like fiddle strings! It is expressive in its way. I can see the sensitive hands which that simile brings so vividly to my mind. White as a woman's perhaps, tender and gentle too. Hands that were all a part of the expression of intense refinement in him. If he took hold of a bubble, the sergeant said, he would not break it. I can well imagine them giving that impression to a man of his superficial observation. But I can see the nervous strength in them too, the emotional power which, under the stress of passion, could well commit the deed of which he was accused and convicted; for which he suffered the utmost penalty of the law.

“You’re all sure he killed her then,” said I, presently.

“Shure, wasn’t he tried at the Code Assizes and didn’t they hang him up at the jail there along by the Western Road? Haven’t I seen the place myself? Did ye think ut was the way the faeries had taken her?”

He put this last question to me with a laugh. In the capacity of a late member of the force, he had nothing to do with such stories as that and would let me know it But when I did not join in his laughter, when he saw the still serious expression in my eyes, the Celt in him rose uppermost. The laughter fell from his lips and he leant across to me.

“I met a woman once, mind ye,” said he, lowering his voice—“an’ she after walking all the ways out of Ballyduff. ’Twas herself told me she’d seen Anna Quartermaine on a May Eve. The mists were over Ballysaggartmore and there were the cows standin’ out in the fields the way she couldn’t see their feet an’ they up to their knees in the white water of the mist like as they’d be standin’ in a stream. An’ didn’t she have to take her ways across the fields, not seeing her feet beneath her as she put them down and with the heart beating in her because it was May Eve an’ after dark —the night when the faeries are out, singing up in the mountains an’ dancing down the boreens. 'Twas she heard the voice of someone singing—and there’s a woman, mind ye, who’d tell no lies. ’Twas singin’, she said, like ye’d ’tice sleep out av a child. And there up against the flank of one of the cows sat herself, milking the beast an’ she croonin’ all the whiles to herself. It was as if the mist rose up all round her and made a dress for her to clothe herself in and there was drops of dew in her hair that shone like rubies and emeralds in the light of the moon. Wisha, I dunno did she see it at all, but there was a woman who told no lies before or since, an’ she goin’ to Mass every Sunday in Ballysaggartmore.”

“You do believe in faeries then?” I asked, for his voice had come to that whisper when a man believes the truth of all he says as though it were the inspired word of God.

“I do not,” said he. “Shure why would I believe in faeries, an’ I drawing me pension from the Gover’ment like an honest man?”

I could not help smiling. It was no longer the Celt who spoke. Officialdom will kill even the spirit of the race in man. This was the price of his pension.

Here then I have tried to convey the portrait of Anthony Sorel that is so plainly set before my mind. No picture of him that I have ever heard of is in existence. I have had to content myself with the gleanings from the observations of others, and these, with no reservations, I have written into the text of this story, which surely no other country but Ireland could ever have made.

CHAPTER V

EARLY the next morning, I took the mountain road and went in search of Malachi.

The day had broken with all the riches of brilliant sunshine, but before long, out of the southwest rode a fleet of clouds. They moved like ships of war in batde array. The foremost of them as they came, swept their shadows down the mountainsides like the colored raiment a magician flings and flings again distractingly before your eyes. I never felt so much as then, the living things that mountains are, with moods and fancies in such bewildering variety.

As with a woman, never are they wholly revealed. The most searching light of sun, the clearest and most cloudless sky cannot disclose all the secrets they contain. Never do they stand forth entirely robbed of mystery. With shadows one peak will protect another as with a thousand subtleties a woman will protect her sex. Always there is some ravine, some deep abyss the sun can never penetrate.

I watched the light that morning come and go as I walked up the mountain road. In its most brilliant illumination, as in its deepest shadow, it was always the same; there was an emotional sense of mystery in that world of solitude, no process of the mind could explain away.

Then, as I walked, I set to wondering whether I could find in the never-expressed recesses of my conscience, that real belief in faeries and the spirits of the other world. But they were too intangible to me then.

By the rime I had reached the foot of Crow Hill and it became necessary for me to leave the road, taking to the little path that made its way through the heather, the fleet of clouds had gathered into rain. A thin mist was blowing like puffs of smoke across the mountains. Knockshunahallion was now hidden, now in sight as if in moments it spoke and then again was wrapped in some silent contemplation within itself. So after some days in that part of the world, I came to the understanding of how the mountains and the trees, the streams and lakes can all speak to one—speech like the discourse of a close and understanding friend who talks of things nearest to the unspoken secrets of one’s soul and can fall into that truest silence with its utter absence of intrusion upon all one’s thoughts.

Reaching my destination, I found the old man, Malachi, digging in the patch of ground beside his cottage. As soon as he heard my footsteps approaching, he ceased from his labor and leant heavily upon his spade, watching me as I came up- the path.

“Well—I find the inn very comfortable,” said I— “thanks to your recommendation. It’s a great bed, that bed with the brass knobs.”

“I niver seen it meself,” said he guardedly.

It was the way he spoke, as much as the way he looked at me that for one instant made me feel ashamed of the part I was playing. I was there to steal a secret from him, a secret he would not confide to God Himself and I felt the unconscious resentment in him against my presence there. What right, I asked myself, was with me in the purpose of my mind? The secret, if indeed he possessed it, was his. His jealous guarding of it was a proof of what it meant to him.

For when once a secret is spoken, it plays no longer any part in the life of him who held it. The very words that tell it, are the broken atoms it becomes.

Should I go back, relinquishing my quest? Should I let it for ever be the mystery it was to me; believing, when the mood would have it so, that the faeries had taken Anna Quartermaine or in another humor, seeing it merely the outburst of passion in a criminal mind? Why was I not content with the mere knowledge that Anthony Sorel had killed her, content as others were to whose knowledge the fact had chanced to come?

In those moments of a pricking conscience, I asked myself these questions; for then I could see myself as a common journalist, picking the souls of others for my daily bread. But it was no good asking them. I was not content. Some hidden purpose, foreign to all gain, seemed there to be served if I could but prosper. I had gone too far in my search. It had become impossible to turn back then. I put the mood away and talked to Malachi about himself.

It was early Spring then. He was preparing the patch of ground for his potatoes.

“Do you eat much meat?” I asked him, curious in mind about his ways of living.

“Meat?” He looked at me with his little eyes. “Where would I be eatin’ meat?”

“None at all?”

“Sometimes they give me a pig’s cheek salted and I’d be earin’ a bit o’ that.”

I asked him if he did not buy fish from the men '' who came round with their donkey butts.

“There was a man down there in Araglin,” I told him, “who came from Ardmore with sprats.”

“I haven’t tasted fish these tin years,” he replied, “ ’cept on Good Fridays when I’d be makin’ a meal for meself an’ havin’ a piece of ling. Shure where would I be gettin’ the copper money to buy fish from thim fellas?”

“Don’t you get any money for the work you do?”

“Work? Shure, I don’t work. What work would I be doin’ an’ me hands tied in knots?” He took a hand from his spade and held it out for me to see; a twisted, horny thing like some willow root, bent and wrinkled with its clinging to the earth. “I live here, yirra,” he added—“I don’t work. What work would a man like meself be doin’ here away in the mountains?”

It was as we were speaking that the mist broke into driving rain. He shouldered his spade and made slowly for the cottage door.

“May I come in?” I asked as he opened it.

“Shure, why not,” said he.

I followed him within, watching him in silence as he took the handle of the bellows-wheel and kindled the dull embers of his little fire into flames.

“What do you do with yourself here in the long winter evenings,” I inquired presently. “In January and December when it’s dark at four o’clock?”

He looked up at me as though questioning my right to that inquisitiveness. I thought at first he was going to keep silent, but at last he spoke.

“Aren’t there all the tales of the world for a man to be tellin’ himself?” he asked strangely. “Wouldn’t a man be dumb with the tongue stiff in his mouth an’ he havin’ no man to talk wid him?”

“Who comes up here then to talk to you those nights?”

“Shure, who, indeed! Is there a man would trust himself out from his fireside on the black mountain, whin the cry of a curlew would turn the blood to ice in him?”

“Who do you talk with then?” I persisted.

“I talk wid meself. Aren’t I after sayin’ a man would be dumb wid the tongue stiff in his mouth? Shure I talk with meself.”

He said it as though there were two persons within him and I experienced a strange sensation of awe, rather than that of fear, as I thought of that old man alone there through the wintry evenings, alone ill his cottage in the mountains. I wondered what the things were he could say—strange things I imagined, which, could I but hear them, I should scarcely understand. A feeling almost of horror came over me. I shuddered as I considered the strangeness of his life. It was so far out of the world. I knew well how in civilized conditions, those conditions in which we tell ourselves all progress lies, how this old man would be thought to be mad.

He could not read, he could not write. So much had Father Dorgan informed me. And there alone, while the long winter evenings spun out their darkness into the deeper blackness of the night, he sat by his fire telling himself the tales of the world. What tales were they? Straighdy I asked him what kind of tale he meant.

“The tales of the men who have loved and fought with the sword,” he said—“the tales of the men who have gone into the still places, where the bearin' of yeer heart would be no more than the wind in the grasses. The tales of war when the hosts came up out of the East and the hosts came up out of the West and one woman was the death of tin thousand men.”

I watched his face in wonder while he was saying this. Had the circumstances been different, had it been any other man, I should have thought he was talking wild nonsense, trying to impress me with the knowledge and the wisdom he possessed. But I could not think that of him. He spoke indeed like one concealing his knowledge rather than expressing it. He made me feel there were a thousand things in the world he knew of, to which my mind was as dead.

And then at last, after he had been speaking in this strain for some moments, he launched forth into one of the wildest and most inconceivable stories I had ever listened to in all my life. Scripture and history, mythology and folk-lore, all were mingled in one incoherent narrative that took no heed of time or place but sped through the centuries and across the regions of the world with such disregard for the accepted dimensions of possibility as could only have come from an unconstrained imagination.

Then I realized somewhat of what Father Dorgan meant when he said that Malachi was mad, but that it was a madness he would not fear to share if it gave him the power of seeing those things winch Malachi could see.

What were those things, I wondered, for slowly the' belief was growing in me that such things did indeed exist. My eyes were blind to a whole world that was revealed to this old man. The external things were those only which I could see. But for him, there was a vision beyond mere externals. He could speak of the passion of a thousand years, as I should speak of the life of one man. He could see in terms of things eternal, when I must divide my day by the hands of a clock. In his imagination, he could travel to the furthest ends of the earth, speaking in wild poetry of lands I only could reach by aid of modern science and could not conceive of without.

As these thoughts came to me, I looked about the room in search of some dock or means by which he could determine on the hour. There was none. “Don’t you keep a dock here?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Have you got a watch then?”

“I have not,” said he.

“How do you tell the time then?”

His little eyes dwelt on me for some moments. I felt almost there was contempt in his mind as he regarded me. At last he answered.

“Away there,” said he and he pointed through the wall of the cottage—“away there lies the East an’ whin die sun comes burnin’ up over Knocknafallia, ’tis the day, an’ whin it drops in a bloody red behind Carran Hill there, ’tis night. Isn’t that enough for a man to be knowing? How would I be readin’ one o’ thim docks an’ I can’t read me own name? Shure, glory be to God, let thim talk about time as gets paid bi ut. Time!” he exclaimed—and what a note of contempt he had in his voice—“Yirra, I wouldn’t distress meself wid ut.”

I thought of our clerks in the cities, watching the hands of the clock as they worked at their desks. I thought of the thousands whose daily attitude towards life was as that of a man who with his own fingers counts out the minutes on the graduated dial. These were they and in their millions, who distressed themselves with Time. So many of the external things were on their hands to do, yet they must divide them into a thousand atoms to help them count its passing. But this old man without one property to distract his mind could count his day just by the rising and the setting of the sun. At that moment I looked at him with honest envy.

“I wish I could say as much,” said I.

We fell then to talking of different matters. Of what was going on in the world—that world I had left behind me—I found he knew nothing. Had he been able to read, I doubt if he would ever have seen a paper. His world was his own. He made it out of his imagination, but so far from that making him unintelligent, it was as though in a man who has lost the sense of sight, all other senses were more keenly tuned in him. He spoke the wisdom of his own thoughts which made me realize how much the spread of education and of modern journalism has killed the power in a man to think for himself.

Wild as his wisdom was, there were in it those great and sudden flashes of the truth. “Time!” he had said—“I wouldn’t distress meself with ut!” And had he said that alone, I should have given him more wisdom than I could have found in a day’s march amongst the men one knows as wise. Who but one who thought for himself would have imagined die use of that word? To distress oneself with Time! How many thousands there are who do!

So, as we talked of other things, I led him gently to the subject foremost in my mind. He spoke of the lonely lake in that desolate hollow on Knockshunahallion.

“Shure, there’s no depth to ut at all,” said he, lowering his voice mysteriously; by which I knew he meant that it was fathomless. “ ’Tis black as night. Haven’t I seen the water on a day in Summer and the sun shining down into ut, with shafts av light the way ye’d go blind in the eyes if ye tuk a look up at ut, an’ didn’t the light shtrike down white into the water an’ didn’t the water turn it as black as Tim Hennissey’s goat? It did indeed. Shure if ye threw a shtone into that lake and wint round the world and came back again on yeer two feet shtandin’, ’twould still be sinkin’ an’ sinkin’.”

This was the lake by the side of which they had found Anthony Sorel. I urged Malachi to tell me more.

“Has anyone ever been drowned in that lake?” I asked and I found my voice too was dropping to the mysterious whisper as though to keep in tune with his.

He stared for a long while into the fire and then at last he answered.

“Did ye hear them speak of Maggie Donovan at Tom Foley’s at all?” he inquired.

“No,” said I.

For a moment he looked silently before him. Then he spat into the fire.

“ ’Twas she had the beauty of all women,” he said presently—“an’ she with the young fellas from all over, dancing wid her at the cross roads an’ takin her walking up there into the hills. ’Tis crazed they were an’ she as beautiful as a blackthorn tree on a long Spring day.”

He would have fallen into a reverie once more, continuing the story in the silence of those dreams of which his life seemed greatly to be composed. Indeed I remember now, for it comes thus prompted to my mind, the vivid impression he gave me then; it was as of one walking in his sleep who wanders from room to room of a vast and silent house, each room, as he comes upon it, awakening some dim remembrances of the daily life, then fading again into the muffled distance of his dream.

Into such a reverie, he would have fallen then, but with the eagerness of my questioning, I stirred him from it.

"What happened to Maggie Donovan up at the lake?” I asked.

He moved on his chair, but still his eyes were staring deep into the heart of the fire as though it were the essence of those thoughts his mind was wrapped in.

“ ’Twas Maggie Donovan was walkin’ by the road, an’ she in her hair wid her littleen shawleen dropped down behind her neck, coming by Foildar-rig. An’ hadn’t she the beauty of all women, an’ didn’t the sparks come out of the boots av the min that danced wid her at the cross roads, the way they danced so lustily? They did indeed. And wasn’t there Nanno O’Shea wid her that day and she tellin’ the priest whin the dung had happened?”

“What happened then?”

Despite myself, despite that spirit of materialism in me which I had believed no other spirit could subdue, I found myself listening with breath eager on my lips, my eyes fixed on his.

“There came wan out av a pass of the hills and down the side av thim, an’ he playin’ on a reed he’d cut bi the side av the lake up there in Knockshuna-hallion. Didn’t they hear his music an’ he cornin’ down the side of the mountain? An’ didn’t the thyme blossoms spring up where his feet had trodden to look which way was he goin’? An’ he played as he came down the side of the hill an’ he with no more than a reed to his ftiouth that he’d cut for himself.”

Malachi paused to turn the quid in his mouth, when, fearing lest he might not go on, I asked him what sort of music it might have been.

“ ’Twas the sounds of the winds,” said he, “that go slippin’ wid the bees over the heather. ’Twas the call of the birds and the music av water that drops through the thick av the moss. Shure didn’t he laugh as he played and wasn’t his laughin’ like the sun shtriking down in the mad race of a shtream? An’ there was he cornin’ down the side av the hill in his liftleen coat, wid the brogues on the feet av him as he danced. ’Twas herself heard him and stood there like wan in a dream where she was. An’ on comes himself an’ she shtandin’ there bi the road, wid her head thrown back an’ her throat like the neck of a bird that is burstin’ wid song an’ her limbs like the saplin’s of ash trees an’ she wid the beauty of all women in her face.”

“What happened then?”

“Yirra, he came droppin’ the spell of the music in her ears an’ she always ready for the dancin’. ‘I must go,’ says she—‘I must go,’ says she, an’ didn’t she follow the feet av him up there into the mists of the mountains, he playin’ the madness into her feet wid his little reed. An’ whin they came to the lake, he walks wid his laughter down there into the wather an’ she after him suckling for the music he played. An’ in she walked an’ in she walked, till the black waters closed over her black hair and all they found whin they came in search av her, was the littleen shawleen floatin’ on the water. Doesn’t it hang in the cottage down there in Foildarrig and can’t they wring the wather out av ut to this day?”

I sat there in silence when he had made an end, wondering what change had come in me that I could almost believe his tale. In another place, at another time, this had been just a story of a romantic suicide; but as I listened to it from his lips in that little cottage in the mountains, it seemed to have a deeper truth than mere narrative. It was this deeper truth, without perhaps his knowing it, that appeared to give reason for its unswerving belief in him.

What was that truth? Should I ever reach it? It was so distant and yet in the very straining I felt in my soul to touch it, it seemed that I was coming closer to the understanding of why Anthony Sorel had killed Anna Quartermaine.

There it was, by that very lake, they had found him sitting, when two days had gone by after her death.

I looked out of the tiny window of Malachi’s cottage. The wind had swept clear the sky once more. The small oblong of his window' showing the sky, was like a rough-cut turquoise set in the uneven wall.

“The rain’s past,” said I.

Without a word he rose from his chair, went to the door and opened it so that his chickens might get out into the light of the sun again.

“How many miles is it to the lake from here?” I asked.

He stood there in the doorway looking up to the heights of the mountain and his red shirt shouted like the blast of a trumpet against that sky.

“ ’Tis a matter of two miles,” said he-—“an’ ’tis the feet av a goat that’ll take ye there.”

“It’s what’s in a man’s heart,” said I—“you’ll find in his feet,” and slipping past him in the doorway I set my face up the mountainside.

CHAPTER VI

THE heather grows spare and thin as you climb the hills. Above a height there is nothing but the coarse mountain grass and the moss, with here and there a wild root of creeping thyme, falling down like the strands of dark hair over the face of the lichened rocks.

Soon I lost myself in the crevices and ravines of the mountains, hollows and gloomy passages, they were, that had looked but mere shadows from the valley below. From there, I could see nothing of the green fields in the lowland around Araglin. The sun crept suddenly in places into the gloom, shafts of light, as through cathedral windows, across the dark spaces of the hills.

It was a world of great silence, where the slipping of a goat over the mountain stones or the cry of a buzzard wheeling overhead, set the heart beating in every pulse. Here indeed, I could imagine, were the great truths to be found. For here it was that Nature in all the glory of her solitude could speak her secrets to the soul of a man.

Here was the truth which my mind had been reaching forth to touch. There it was for my seeing, if but the eyes of my imagination had been clear, unmisted by that material vision which is a glass, smoked and dim before the sight of the soul.

But at every moment the loneliness of the place encompassed me. I could not see the face of Nature for the consciousness of my own solitude; and yet I felt that I was standing in one of those places of the earth where most generously she reveals herself.

With an effort I snatched my mind away from that oppressive self-contemplation. I thought of Anthony Sorel, living his life, day following night, night following day in the long silences of those hills. What had he believed? There was abundant evidence in his poems that that solitude, those dim-lit hollows and all the mystery which wrapped them round had brought their hidden revelations to his soul.

If I must learn my soul,
Then, where no feet have trod,
Give me the speed
To reach my need,
And through long days
But let me gaze
Into the deep eyes of God.

So he wrote and I feel sure that then he was speaking of those very mountain passes; for again, in another poem, he says:

I am alone with the sob of the wind,
The rushes are chanting the wind’s wild song;
And I hear them say as they drift and bind,
The voice of God is a silent voice,
And the patience of God is long.

It is ever when he writes of the attributes of God, that I feel he is speaking of Nature, both which to him were one.

I took his book out of my pocket then, for I brought it with me wherever I went, and read those verses and many others beside. For an hour I sat there on the table of a great bowlder surrounded by the dim light of the gray mists that kept sweeping by, until I felt almost that the spirit of Anthony Sorel had arisen and entered into me.

Such gentleness of imagery, such sensitiveness to the truths and the beauties of Nature I How, I wondered, could that ever have been flung into the wild frenzy of murder and sudden death? The more I seemed to achieve understanding of the spirit of the man, the more incomprehensible did it become.

Shutting the volume and putting it back again in my pocket, there fell upon my mind the recollection of what the old bookseller in Notting Hill had said —“Why does a man kill a woman, unless because he hates or loves her overmuch.” But as I came to my understanding of him, Anthony Sorel was a visionary. In all his work, he cried that fact aloud. Was it in such a man that love or hatred could become obsession? I could not conceive the bodily passions in him overcoming the purpose of his soul. Yet in the portrait I had formed of him within my mind, there were always the sensitive lips on which kisses would have burnt like coals of fire.

So I put the book in my pocket and made my way still higher up into the mountain in search of that lake where, after those two days, they had found him. It was suddenly that I came upon it, hidden away in that lofty amphitheater of the hills.

A chill struck through me as I turned the corner of the cliff and found it there before my eyes. The blade waters were so silent and so still. An almost irresistible impulse rushed upon me to cast myself down into it and wrench from it the secrets of its. depths. I stood there trembling. It was no earthly place.

Well indeed could I believe as I stood beside the edge, that the faeries had taken Maggie Donovan there to her wandering sleep. So earthly a thing as suicide could never have been attempted there—the very human purpose of it would have shuddered and stood still in a swift arrest. Nothing but the unseen powers could ever induce a human thing to let those inky waters close forever on its head.

Here was I learning the meaning of the faeries swift and fast. They are the symbols of our un-traceable moods which no science of psychology in the mind of man can ever hope to reveal.

And there, in those silent mountains, gazing “into the deep eyes of God” the moods of a man are Nature’s moods; the truths of her are his.

What indeed must have been the mood of Anthony Sorel, when, as I understand, he sat beside that awesome lake one day and all one night until they found him? So black, so terrible a thing it must have been, that I shivered as I thought of the desolation of it.

All down the mountainside from the peaks above it, great stones and bowlders had been cast that had never reached die water’s edge. How many thousands, I wondered, had not sped onwards in their thundering acceleration and been lost in the fathomless waters. Playthings of the giants they were, flung down by mighty hands as boys throw pebbles in a stream.

So ran one’s thoughts in such a place. Giants and faeries not only became real, but were the only realities. For there it seemed, man was a puny thing. As I stood there I was overwhelmed with my own insignificance. Strong swimmer as I was, I knew I could never trust myself in those still waters; not from the belief that currents would suck me down, or if it was, it did not speak in those words to my mind. The fear that hidden hands would grasp me was that which thrust itself upon my thoughts. I peered into the water and, in the quivering lights I saw, that flashed and faded and then flashed again, could well believe they were the hungry eyes of those that lay in wait for human things.

And here it was that they had taken Anthony Sorel, in the last moments of his remorse or his despair.

I turned away with a sick horror in my mind and climbed down the mountain once again. This time I went by a different way when, taking the turning of a wandering path, I came upon a cottage, roofless, windowless, that cried out its lonely desolation to the echoes of the hills.

I knew at once it must be the place where Anthony Sorel had lived, yet scarce anything remained but the four walls to show a sign of life. The chimney even was shattered, yet there were the marks of the smoke on the wall where he had lit his fire. There was the gaping window on which doubtless he had often leant, looking out across the mists, gazing even from there into those “deep eyes of God.”

All the floor was sprinkled with debris, the brown straws of the thatch, the crumbling mortar, the very beams that had upheld the thatch.

In its day it had been such a cottage as Malachi’s, one-roomed with a door at back and front. The floor was of mud, cracked here and there.

It was in one crack of the floor, as I looked at it, that something glittered and winked as I moved my head. It spurred my curiosity. Swiftly I went down on my knees and with a pen-knife cut away the hard caked earth.

There lay a ring—a ring of gold, setting an emerald roughly cut. With heart beating at my discovery, I took it out into the wider light, looking at it as one looks at some treasure found in an Egyptian prince’s tomb.

As I turned it over, I saw the letters of an inscription inside the band. Dirt clogged the letters. I wetted my finger and rubbed them clear and this was what I read:

“Out of the earth.”

I read it again and again. What memory was it that it raised in me? Then I remembered—it was a phrase, oft repeated in one of Anthony Sorel’s poems.

This incident of die ring I have mentioned because, at the time, it brought so near to my mind the life of Anthony Sorel in that place, still more the death of Anna Quartermaine. For though I was never able to confirm my belief that she it was who had given it him; though indeed, in all the story that I heard from Malachi’s lips, he never mentioned it, yet it convinced me then, when I found it, that it had played some part between these two whose history is now lost amongst the echoes of those Irish hills.

CHAPTER VII

A FEW days after my visit to the lake, I dropped in one evening, as he had bid me, to see Father Dorgan.

It was a cold night, late in the month of March and a fire was burning cheerfully in his parlor. The light in the room was pleasant, but dim, for except for the light of the fire, starting and dancing on the walls and ceiling, only two candles were burning on the table between which he had placed the book he was reading.

The housekeeper, an ugly old woman, slightly deaf and with a wall eye, had opened the door announcing me, and giving him no warning of my coming.

At the hall door, we had spent some difficult moments over the pronunciation of my name. After two or three ineffectual attempts, I had given up all hope of her mastering the first part of it and had resigned myself to spelling the second part alone.

Even then, with the separate letters carefully spelled out by me, she had not grasped it but opened the door, announcing “Mr. Thrruston,” with a great rolling of “r’s.”

He looked at me steadily from between the points of the lighted candles; then, suddenly recollecting our meeting by the bank of the river, he rose and genially held out his hand.

“Good evening, Mr. Thrruston,” said he.

The vanity which is in all of us and makes it impossible for us to hear the mispronunciation of our names compelled me to correct him. I said my name clearly and distinctly.

“Ah—shure, I see,” said he—“Mr. Thrruston— ah, of course—what a fool she was.”

He had pronounced it exactly the same. I let it go at that.

“Well—now would ye like any more light?” he went on. “It’s dim in here, a man couldn’t see the way to his mouth and I’ll get herself to make us a drop of punch.”

As to the way to my mouth I had nothing to say, but for any other account I begged him not to light more candles for me. Knowing what was in my mind to discuss, I felt that dim, suggestive light was far more conducive to his confidence.

“Oh—we have a lamp,” said he, as though he wished me to know that they were not wanting in matters of convenience.

“I’d prefer this light,” I persisted, at which, shrugging his shoulders in acknowledgment of the fact that I was his guest and must have things to my liking, he went in search of the housekeeper to tell her about the punch.

Whilst he was gone, I looked about me. It was a high-ceilinged room, unfurnished with any of those comfortable luxuries with which you might expect a man to surround himself when he lives alone. And yet, it did not want for comfort. The sense that it was a haunted house seemed unable to penetrate the thick curtains that were drawn before the high windows. The two sacred pictures on the walls offered nothing in the comforting suggestion of decoration, yet they gave an atmosphere to the place which you felt to be in keeping with the man.

Things out of keeping in a room, however luxurious they may be, contribute in no way to the real essence of comfort. The body may be at ease, but with a restless spirit there can be no repose. The restfulness of that room was in the flicker of the Are, the two candles burning on the table, the shielding curtains shutting out the night and the sense of quiet contemplation it all offered to the mind.

I leant over the table, looking at the book he had been reading, still lying open where he had left it. There I knew I should more suddenly and closely come upon the man of whom as yet I knew so very little.

It was the Bible and it was opened at the book of Job. I think I must have smiled, realizing as I did that this was no occupation of faith, but the recreation of a man who knew the worth of literature and knew it at its best I had left the table and was warming my hands at the fire when he returned. The first thing he did was quietly to close the book, replacing it in the bookshelves that stood against the wall. I smiled again to myself. So evidently was it literature to him; I have no belief in the Bible that is openly displayed upon a table in any room. It is seldom read.

He motioned me to a horsehair armchair near the fire, seating himself on the chair he had occupied before, but turning it round from the table, the better to be able to talk to me.

“Well,” said he—“how do ye find yeerself in Araglin? ’Tis like a peep into the grave after London, I suppose.”

“It’s quiet enough,” I admitted, “but I didn’t come here expecting to find it anything else.”

“Have ye ever been to Ireland before?”

I told him how I had lived some years in the South and knew it well, though this part of the country was new to me.

To every answer of mine, he kept nodding his head, saying, half under his breath, “Indeed—indeed”—a habit he no doubt had acquired from the confessional. I had often noticed it in other priests. So he continued asking me questions, only pausing when the old woman came in with the punch tumblers and all those necessary ingredients for its making. I was quite contented to sit there, answering him, knowing that sooner or later, without my forcing it upon him, he would come upon the purpose of my visit to Araglin. While he made the punch, he spoke but little. It was an important ceremony, needing attention. First the hot water in the tumblers with their little lips. This to bring them to the requisite warmth. Then the sugar, melted in a wineglassful of steaming water, again a wineglass ful of whisky, then the shreds of lemon peel cut for the thinness of a wafer and last of all the boiling water to the brim. From one of the tumblers he poured out a wineglassful and handed it to me.

“That’ll turn March into July,” said he.

I sipped it and the fumes rose warmly to my nostrils. He watched my face for approval as I drank it and there was a smile half-humorous, half of enjoyable anticipation in his eyes.

“Well?” said he.

“Splendid,” said I—“an excellent antidote for winter.”

“Faith, ye’re right there,” said he. “A man can pull the curtains, set a match to the fire till the skin of him’s warm, but ’tis this stuff lights the kindling inside of him.”

After the punch-making, he settled down to his questioning again, not with that same eagerness of curiosity now, but with a genuine interest, finding that I was quite ready to tell him all he wanted to know.

When I replied to one of his questions that I was a writer, his sharp eyes fixed the more keenly on my face.

“Indeed—indeed,” said he. “I’ve not come across the name.”

I did not think that was likely, even if he had got it right. But he said it with a charming air of apology as though it argued an inexcusable ignorance in him. However, I quickly exonerated him of that.

“I can’t expect to penetrate,” said I, “into places where people really are alive. Life there would be too short for them to dream of reading me. You read the right sort of stuff—” I nodded my head to the book he had put away.

“Ah—there’s some poetry there,” said he and we fell to talking upon the decay of poetry, both amongst those who read and those who write it.

“I don’t call it the fault of the poets,” said he. “If there’s no beauty about bearing children in the mind of a woman she won’t have a beautiful child. She wjll not. Faith, ye might say she’d never have a child at all. ’Tis the fault of the people beyond over, they don’t want things beautiful and yirra, they don’t get ’em. That’s the way with ’em. They don’t want children and faith, don’t they go barren? Shure, ye can get beauty for nothing but ’tis amusement they want and that’s the divil’s expense. Didn’t I have to pay five shillings for my seat in a London theater to see a lot of painted canvas they called a glorious production and couldn’t I see things up in these mountains the way the tears ’ud come into me eyes to be lookin’ at them an’ I walkin’ there for nothing on me two feet. Haven’t we got more poets than anything else in this country an’ they, half of them, writing in prose the way they’d put bread into their mouths. The whole matter with yeer business,” he continued, “is that ye have to live by it. Shure if I gave the thrush in my garden a worm for every song he sang, wouldn’t he get choked in the throat of him? He would so.”

I must confess it was no little joy to me to sit there listening to this kind of idealism. It voiced the instinct which every one of us would obey—if we could—if we had die courage. As it is, there is scarcely one of us who dare even mention it, so conscious are we of the inevitable accusation of folly, and of the certain contempt of our fellows.

But I could say what I liked to him without any such fear as this. I could tell things to him—an utter stranger—things I would not dare to say—as he would have put it—beyond over.

“An’ is it the way ye’ve come here to get away from it all?” he asked me presendy.

I admitted incidentally that that was so.

“However, I have another more definite reason,” said I and out of my pocket I pulled the volume of Anthony Sorel’s poems.

He looked at it long and intendy. Then his head shot up with a sudden jerk and he looked at me.

“Where did ye get this?” he asked.

I told him where I had bought it—how long ago.

Then he nodded his head backwards and forwards as he gazed at me.

“What have ye found out from old Malachi?” he inquired.

“Nothing,” said I, for so far my endeavors had been fruitless. Whenever I had mentioned the name of Anthony Sorel to the old man, and I had done so, always in a casual way, every day that I had seen him, he had shrunk into himself like a snail disturbed upon the garden path.

“ ’Tis the silence of the dead he has in him,” said lie—and then he added, “Yirra, that story’ll never be written.”

“Do you know nothing about it yourself?” I inquired.

“Nothing but what any people about these parts know as well. The unfortunate young man admitted that he’d killed her.”

“He did admit it?”

“He did of course. Shure, wasn’t the blood of her on his hands when they found him.”

“Did he give any reason for killing her?”

“He did not—divil a word. ’Twas himself keeping long silences and they hanging him with nothing passing his lips from the moment he said he was guilty.”

“I heard he had said something about justice when he was being tried.”

“Oh—he did indeed—‘Them seek for justice’— ’twas himself said it—‘them seek for justice the way they’d hunt for a shillin’ under a stone.’ And there was an amount of truth in it mind ye, for I’ve a feeling in me ’twas not the justice of God they were after giving him if a’ be it was the justice of the law. And shure—what’s the law, will ye tell me that, and they sending Michael Daly to prison because he deserted the Army and he sickening to be with the mother who’d suckled him from a babe?”

For a while we both fell to meditation while he turned over the pages of the book I had given into his hands.

“Have you read them?” I asked him presently.

“I have indeed,” he replied. “Didn’t I take a copy for a while from Father Killery in Ballysaggartmore and didn’t he hear all about it from Father Nolan, he that was parish priest in the place whin the thing happened?”

“Is Father Nolan alive?”

I asked it so eagerly and so quickly that he turned a smile to me.

“He is not,” said he.

I must have shown the bitterness of my disappointment, for he smiled again.

“If he were,” continued he, “ye’d learn little more than what Father Killery knows, or what I know and what plenty round about in these parts know as well. They will have it round here, that that old man Malachi knows the secret of it; but between me and the tumbler of punch there, I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know anything at all.”

“You think it was just a common, sordid murder then?”

I know I must have spoken warmly, for the heat of my belief was very strong in me. Ever since that morning when I had stood beside the lake in the mountains, when I had found the ruins of Anthony Sorel’s cottage and had discovered that ring in the crack of the mud floor, not only had the story become doubly real to me but a thousand times more firmly had grown the conviction in my mind that this was no crime of vicious motives. I did not willingly incline to the belief that the faeries had taken her; but coming to that realization of what the faeries meant, that they were the poetic symbols of those intangible moods of the mind, which no psychologist can either explain or define, I could so readily understand how such a belief had grown in these credulous children of the mountains.

For some reason, Anthony Sorel had killed Anna Quartermaine, some reason upon which it would be beyond any court of law to legislate. So, in his hour of trial, he had kept silence rather than be misunderstood and so, out there in the dim mists of the mountains, the people had seen her walking with the faeries for want of that understanding which maybe the old man, Malachi, was the only one in die world by whom it was possessed.

“Is that what you really think?” I repeated—“that the man who could sing the songs he did, was capable of the foul and ugly, instincts of a common murderer?”

“D’ye know what I’d like to be able to think?” said he.

“What?”

His eyes twinkled—not altogether in humor but partly with an intensity of inward light which perhaps I never shall be able completely to understand.

“I’d like to think,” said he, “that she was down there, walking the fields with the faeries in Foildarrig, because, mind ye, that young fella could sing a song as well as the thrush that sits on the top of the thorn bush at the bottom of my garden. And when I think of himself taking the knife in his hand and planting it in her, the way his own hands were spurted with blood, then all the music goes out of them verses to me. I’d sooner hear an owl screeching the hoarseness out of itself on a long night than listen to one of them poems.”

“Well—why not think it?” said I eagerly. “What harm is there to a man to believe in faeries?’”

He sat staring for a long while into the fire as though meditating upon thoughts his mind had suddenly been reawakened to. I would not interrupt him, but let him think. At last he looked up at me with that same intensity of inward light still in his eyes.

“What would the Bishop say,” he asked, “and he hearing that Father Dorgan believed in faeries? Shure don’t ye know that the Faith has no call for faeries at all? The souls of the departed dead are in Purgatory and isn’t that enough for any man to be believing?”

“Yet many of these people round here,” said I, “who go regularly to Mass every Sunday, they believe in faeries. Would their lives be quite as they are, would they be so near to the truth of things, if they didn’t?”

“Ye put great honor on the faeries,” he remarked presently.

“I do,” said I.

“D’ye believe in them yeerself?”

“No—I wish I could. I wish I could reduce my mind to that state of simplicity. I can’t. It’s hampered and choked up by all the thousand disadvantages of education; like yours is—if you’ll forgive my saying so—by religion. I’m not a Protestant; you can’t accuse me of party faith; but it seems to me that all forms of orthodoxy such as you find in religion and in education, they all destroy the freedom that is the only salvation in the soul of a man. I’ve no doubt that education teaches the mind to think, but not with any freedom; only on those lines which education itself has formulated for one and all alike. Scholarship is the whole system, to achieve which a man must cram his head with prescribed knowledge. But that has no meaning for the freedom of his soul. It’s only because I’ve been brought up under that system of education and you in that orthodoxy of religion that, failing a belief that the faeries took Anna Quartermaine, we can only conceive of her death as that of a sordid murder. So you say that, since you can’t believe she is still walking the fields in Foildarrig it drives your mind to find no music in any of Anthony Sorel’s poetry. Isn’t that slavery of the mind? Aren’t there a million tones and colors between white and black—and when we talk like that, aren’t we blind to every blessed one of them?”

He straightened himself up in his chair and took a sip of his punch.

“Ye’ve got dangerous talk in ye, young man,” said he. “If we all had that freedom of soul, Hell ’ud be a queer place and over-full, I’m thinking.”

“Would it?” I exclaimed. “Can you point a finger of accusation at the morals and virtues of these very people of yours who despite your Mass and your confessional, still have a freedom of soul which not even the power of Rome can take away from them? Over in England, we call them superstitious. We think of them with minds still wrapped in the darkness of superstition. But isn’t it because the thing we call progress is no progress at all? All our science is engaged in adding a few years to the life of the body, as if that mattered when the body must die in the end. And so it is that the valuation of life has become absurd. The deeper we study Nature with instruments and with microscopes, the further we get away from her, the more we shrink from death. And the more we shrink from death, the firmer grows the belief in us that there is no life for the soul hereafter. How can a man believe in his own soul if he’s so concerned with the life of his body? Can a man escape out of prison if he is forever striving to make unbreakable the chains which bind him?”

Father Dorgan regarded me steadily as though the heresy that I spoke must be excused in me because I was not of his faith. But added to the meaning of that glance, or perhaps it was only my fancy, I seemed to see a light of envy in his eyes. He had wished—so he had said to me—that he could be as mad as Malachi, if it would enable him to see the things Malachi saw. Now I felt that he wished he could be as free in his speech as I. His next question almost convinced me that my fancy was not false.

“What do ye make of the faeries then?” he asked.

“Symbols,” said I—expressing for the first time in words those thoughts that had come to me in the mountains—“symbols of all our untraceable moods. That’s as far as I’ve got. If I were to live long enough in these mountains, perhaps I should become simple enough to be able to see them myself. But because I’m not, I don’t believe that other people don’t see them.”

“I’ve thought that myself,” said he. “I’ve thought they can’t have all this talk in them and they seeing nothing -at all. But what sort of moods d’ye mean? Shure how can ye have a symbol of a mood?” I seized upon a simile, the first that came haphazard to my mind.

“What do you feel when the mist comes down from the mountains?” I asked—“when all day long it drips in drops of water from the trees all round you here and night seems like an abortion, bom before its time? What do you feel then?”

“Faith, I feel as if me heart was made of lead and I’d take to the grave as soon as look at a man.” “Well—isn’t that a mood? And doesn’t the mist from the mountains bring it down upon you? And in that mood, wouldn’t you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when the sun was up and the sky was blue—when God was in his Heaven as Browning said? Who’s to judge you for what you do in such a mood as that? What brought it? The mist. Isn’t that mist then the creator of your mood and with but a little effort couldn’t you let your imagination stretch forth to see that mist as the breath of some unholy thing that had crept its way down the mountainside to poison you? Then wouldn’t that unholy thing become the symbol of your mood? And when you laugh and when you sing to yourself—and when you despair and when you determine—aren’t all those moods, coming from such impulses as you can never detect? Why not symbols for them all? There are good faeries, there are bad faeries, there are faeries of death and faeries of life. That’s what faeries are—the symbols of all those things in life which none of us will ever understand. We teach them to our children—less and less it’s true—but we never teach them to ourselves, because we think that our wisdom of progress can do without them. Our study is of the body. But faeries are bodiless things. They take shape to themselves, but they are all shapes that vanish in the thin air. Why shouldn’t Anthony Sorel have killed Anna Quartermaine for a reason that neither you nor I can understand? But just because it was the body he killed and by the body that he must be judged, they set him up there to receive justice at the hands of fallible men. Twelve men decide upon the facts. As if facts count when facts and bodies are the only things that die.”

He got up and stirred the lire.

“I don’t know that I ought to be talkin’ to ye at all,” said he. “Faith, ye’d talk a hen off of her eggs —ye would so. But I don’t know that what ye’re after saying doesn’t stir up a good many things I’d be thinking meself. Mind ye I can’t quite under stand why a young man like that should be killing a woman like herself, unless ’twas the way the wits had gone out of him. But there was never said anything about that at the trial. I do believe they had the doctor to him but the doctor found him sane enough. And another thing I can’t understand is why she came to be dressed in those colleen’s clothes an’ she livin’ like a high lady down in a great house in Ballysaggartmore.”

“How much do you know about her?” I inquired. “Oh—shure, I know what Father Killery told me and he hearing it first hand from Father Nolan what went before him. ’Twas Father Nolan knew her well. Shure, didn’t he hear herself in confession.” “Can you tell me what you know?”

“Well indeed then, there’s no harm in telling,” said he and he drew his chair round before the dying fire and told me what he knew.

CHAPTER VIII

THERE’S no doubt,’’ said he—“she had the beauty of all women in her face.”

This was what Malachi had said of Maggie Donovan. It was indeed a saying of the people, a simple phrase enough, but full of expression as they speak it.

“She must have been a woman with thirty years to her,” he went on presently—“and she living in Ballysaggartmore from a child. Her father was an Englishman, but her mother was one of the Connells of Castle Connell away there in County Tipp’rary. ’Twas they could trace their names back to the kings of Ireland, and the house in Ballysaggartmore belonged to them.”

“Why did she never marry?” I asked.

There was the need with him as there was with Malachi, to prompt with questions. He was ever in danger of drifting into the contemplation of his own thoughts.

“She wasn’t married—was she?”

He had not answered my first question, wherefore I urged him again.

“She was not,” he replied at last—“and she with all the sons of the gentry round making offers to her an’ not one of them to her likin’. I’m think-in’ ’tis queer she was, she livin’ there all with her self in that big house. The old man died when herself was a slip of a girl and her mother was soon after him.”'

“Did she never go away at all—to England or abroad?”

“She did indeed. Every year they’d shut up the big house the way 'twould look as if the ghosts had brought a bad name to it and away she’d go with all them servants sent back to their homes. An’ months ’ud go by, nobody knowing where her ladyship was, till suddenly the train would come into Lismore one line morning and there’d be boxes piled up on the platform an’ it steamin’ out of the station. ‘ ’Tis Anna Quartermaine come back from her journeys,’ they’d say, an’ shure weren’t they right? All the boxes would go up to the house in Ballysaggartmore and herself would come back the next day. Shure ye’d see the servants lollin’ out of the windows and the whole place lookin’ as if it were alive again. Oh, indeed there were queer stories goin’ about in those days with herself cornin’ back after three months’ absence. Wasn’t there one man goin’ about the world over, said he’d seen herself an’ she walkin’ in the cities of Egypt, the way she’d be walkin’ down by the side of the Black-water? I dunno, was it true, but Father Nolan had the tale to himself from the man who saw her.”

“Well—that’s quite possible,” said I—“many people go to Egypt. Thousands go out from England to winter there. But if she traveled as much as all that, how is it she never met anyone to take her fancy? She was wealthy—wasn’t she?” “Indeed, she’d a power of money,” said he.

But what might have been a power of money to him and all the people over there, may not in reality have been so considerable a sum. With five hundred pounds a year a girl is an heiress in the South of Ireland. There are plenty of offers of marriage waiting for her.

I have seen the house myself in Ballysaggartmore, and though in comparison with the houses in the neighborhood, it is imposing enough, there is nothing in it to suggest that any fabulous amount of wealth would have been needed for its up-keep. It stands in its own grounds, completely hidden from the road, with a little thatched cottage at the lodge gates. There must be thirty acres there of fields and garden round the house itself.

At the time I went there it was unoccupied and with a little persuasion on my part, the old woman at the lodge showed me over. There were some fine rooms in it—one room in particular that faced away to the mountains. It was in that room, so she told me, that Anna Quartermaine had lavished the full expression of that taste there is no doubt she possessed.

“They say ’twas hung wid purple,” said she— “the way ye’d think ’twas halfways to the grave.” But this I can well believe was exaggeration, grown as stories do so swiftly grow, out of the air of mystery surrounding her name. All that I gathered from the various accounts I received in Ballysag-gartmore, was that she was a woman of keenly artistic perceptions and taste—a type of mind which I have no doubt was little understood by the people with whom she came in contact.

Things, for instance, have been told me which prove to my mind that she was no more peculiar than many a woman I have known who likes to be surrounded with beautiful things. Yet it was this very culture in her which, to the people of Bally-saggartmore, appeared to indicate a strangeness of temperament they were too gentle in their thoughts to call insane. Even Father Dorgan still carried the impression in his mind that she was queer. I have no such thoughts myself. As I have seen her, Anna Quartermaine was an intensely human woman.

Beautiful she must have been. I see no reason to suppose that they exaggerated upon that score. The picture I have seen of her bears it out.

She was tall and nobly made. Her love of the country where for miles she walked alone into the mountains, must well have added health to her beauty. Advanced even in those days, as her taste appears to have been, I have found no trace of a mind that was abnormal or distorted, as the mind so often is, by a cult of beauty.

Dressed in fitting garments, they say, she would often set forth in the morning, a walking-stick in her hand, a dog at her heels, turning her face up the mountain road and only returning when evening had well set in. There is a cottage on the moor land above Ballyduff where lives an old couple who well remember her coming to their door for a cup of milk and a piece of griddle bread. This seems to have been the only way she took her meals when on those journeys.

“A short skirteen she’d on her,” they told me, “an’ she wid the mud on her boots the way she might have been liftin’ the praties in the fields.”

This picture, combined with that portrait I saw, of a woman dressed so beautifully, even then, that one forgot the cruel fashion of the time, gives me the impression of an arresting personality. I was not concerned with the suggestion of suspicion in the voices of those who told me that she made use of rouge upon her lips and cheeks. Unknown as it may have been in those days for one in her position, I am only the more convinced of that originality in her which must so deeply have stirred the impressionable mind of Anthony Sorel.

Anna Quartermaine was an uncommon woman, of that I have no doubt. The very fact of her unmarried existence alone in that old house is proof of it; the sudden tragedy of her death, a greater proof than all. But notwithstanding all this, I carry no impression of an unnatural creature in my mind. As the work of some men is before their time, so the temperament of Anna Quartermaine must have been in advance of the conditions in which she lived. There may be, indeed there are many like her to-day; women who refuse the limita tions of die state of matrimony because a wild freedom of imagination in them cannot submit to its narrow boundaries.

Still, remembering Father Dorgan’s statement that she was queer, I pressed him further on that point.

“Would you deny women a right to freedom,” I asked him, “just because the vast majority of them seem to have no particular liking for it? I can’t see that there was anything queer about Anna Quartermaine. It’s not necessarily queer to be different from other people. Can’t you conceive a woman having such exacting ideals, that she keeps herself aloof from marriage rather than sacrifice the most vital possession she has for the doubtful benefits of convenience?”

“ ’Tis not natural,” said he with rigid conviction. “Shure, if a’ be ’twas natural would she have been found up there in the stretch of the heather, she with the blood still warm on her breast an’ her blind eyes turned up to the stars? She would not. For what was there natural in that? ’Twas an unholy passion that brought her to such a pass as that. Faith, isn’t that why they hushed up the whole affair and she one of the Connells of Castle Connell?”

I leant forward in my chair and stared for long into the fire. I felt then that I was on the verge of understanding.

“If you and I could believe in faeries,” said I, “we might be capable of the conception of a passion great enough to have passed all question of unholiness. It’s her death that makes it unholy to us. We think of that which severs life from the body and with our valuation of it, can imagine no more terrible thing. Why should not a man’s passion for a woman, or hers for him, be so transcendent a thing as that death becomes a little thing beside it? Have we lost all the conception of an overwhelming and imperishable love such as they had in the days of Dante and Beatrice? Was death anything to them? Are we such languid, weakly creatures now that we cannot rise to such heights of passion as are reached in death? . You think the love—for love there must have been—of Anna Quartermaine for Anthony Sorel was an unholy and sensual thing—well, look at this—”

I pulled out of my pocket the ring I had found in Anthony Sorel’s cottage and laid it on the table there before him.

So evidently had it been a woman’s ring that I was prepared to uphold it as a gift from her to him.

“Look at the inscription,” I went on, when I had told him how I had come by it. “Look at the inscription; engraved on it, so I believe, solely for him, when she gave the thing to him. The letters are cut, long since the ring was made. The sharpness of them held the earth. It was with difficulty I rubbed them dear.”

He read it in an uncertain voice.

“ ‘Out of the earth—’ ” and then again—“ ‘out of the earth’—well—what do ye make of that?” he asked.

I opened the book of poems, turning with certain fingers to the verses it contained in which that very phrase was used.

“That’s what I make of it,” said I.
What shall we win, you and I,
Out of the earth?
What shall we win,
If we toil and spin?—
Will the day draw out
To a night of doubt
Ere we win, you and I,
Out of the earth?

What shall we win, you and I,
Out of the earth?
Where the dew is wet,
Are there jewels yet
You never wore?
Can love yield more
Ere we win—you and I,
Out of the earth?

He laid the book down on the table, placing his hand upon the closed cover as though it were a story that was ended, a matter past the need of speech. For a moment it seemed as if he had nothing further to say, but at last he raised his eyes and looked at me.

“There are so many worlds,” said he enigmatically. “Shure, how can a man live in them all in one lifetime?”

CHAPTER IX

THIS was the first, but not the last of the visits I paid to Father Dorgan while I was in Araglin. A tentative, half timid desire in the man to touch the knowledge of those things his faith denied him, was greatly attractive to me. He was so fervently a Catholic and yet so drawn, by all the Celtic influences within him, to the visionary spirit.

“Ye’ve got the dangerous speech in ye,” he was always saying to me and if indeed there was anything I might say which ever could be dangerous, I felt it was a danger he courted rather than feared.

We might talk of a thousand different things, but always the conversation came round to the same topic, the death of Anna Quartermaine and how the visionary spirit and the freedom of the imagination could alter one’s whole aspect of that tragedy in the hills. I have known a Catholic priest to play with the fire of science, burning the fingers of his faith yet ever drawn to it as a child to the forbidden fire. It was so with Father Dorgan and the subject we so often discussed.

When he sprinkled the four corners of Power’s fields with holy water, it was he assured me as one dispensing the blessing of God upon the harvest to come. But Power himself openly confessed to me, it was to keep off the evil faeries.

“Don’t they take the seeds,” said he, “for their own harvest and isn’t it the way they put grains of sand into the furrows to fool ye—deuce take ’em!”

I have my suspicions that much of this was in Father Dorgan’s mind as well, for one evening he said to me,

“What right have ye to be believing in the faeries? Weren’t ye born a Protestant and isn’t there English blood in ye to the tips of yeer fingers?”

It was almost as though he resented my point of view, for no matter how earnestly I assured him that I wished my mind were so simple in its attitude, I think he never really understood how the willingness of the spirit to believe could not conquer the impotence of the flesh to see. He has even taunted me with seeing these bodiless spirits on the mountainside, all in good humor but with, I believe, a taint of jealousy in his thoughts.

From him I learnt a great deal more of Anna. Quartermaine which must be written when the tale comes to be told. Father Nolan it appears had known her well and had spoken freely to Father Killery, from whom Father Dorgan had gathered his facts.

I do not wish here for one moment to infer that any confidence such as he might have learnt in the confessional was ever repeated by one priest to the other. Had I heard such things, I might indeed have been able to lay bare the very secrets of her soul. This information that I gathered and with infinite pains, was only from such report as might well have been spread about her by one who knew her well. And what I heard from Father Dorgan, from many another too beside, all the merest scraps of history that I could gather together, I have knit in one story—the tale of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine.

Yet without that which I learnt from Malachi, it would have been impossible to write. And it was Malachi who kept silence longest of all. Day after day I visited him up in the hills until he had found the ease of speech with me. He would talk indeed of a thousand things, but never the subject I needed from him most of all.

Through him my mind became imbued with all the grand and passionate simplicity of Irish folklore. Even though he was so seldom seen by any of those who lived in the neighboring villages, yet he had a wide reputation as a teller of tales. There are many his like in the more remote parts of Ireland. They seem to perpetuate the old spirit of the wandering bards, telling their stories in the wild poetry of prose and always concluding their narratives with the simple finality, “That is my story.”

Malachi never told his stories twice in the same way. I learnt by that, for I heard many of them again and again, how much he brought his imagination to bear upon the telling of them. Their substance seldom differed; it was the details that changed. There was one story of a great lady in Connemara that he told me three separate times, and every time he dressed her in different garments, calling upon the beauties of Nature for his likenesses, and each time his descriptions became more wonderful in their poetic conception.

This drawing upon Nature for his ceaseless need of imagery was characteristic of all the tales he told. As he had said of Maggie Donovan, "She was as beautiful as a blackthorn bush on a long Spring day,” so he gave pictorially from Nature in every story he related to me.

I remember well his description of the great lady in Connemara—“She rose from her chair,” said he, wishing to give me the impression of the greatness of her anger—“she rose from her chair, like a cloud going up into the mountains, and haven’t I seen sparks out av the hoofs av gallopin’ horses would have died black out beside the light in her eyes.”

Well could a book be made out of the stories I had from Malachi, those long days in his little cottage under the shadow of Knockshunahallion. But the story I so eagerly waited for him to tell me, of that I heard nothing.

Whenever I mentioned the name of Anthony Sorel, or spoke of Anna Quartermaine, the lids of his eyes tightened the one upon the other. His withered skin puckered into a thousand wrinkles and the whole mentality of him seemed to shrink to nothingness before me. He never definitely told me that he would not speak of it, for words were not needed from him then. He became like a book that is sealed and locked upon the lectern. Its pages were no longer open for me to read and usually, when it came to this, he would speak but little upon any subject, withdrawing his mind into that silent contemplation from which it was impossible to distract him.

One day I found him seated over his fire, racked with a cold and struggling to get the warmth into him.

He spoke despairingly of death, a subject he often talked about but never with such melancholy as then.

“Won’t ut be cornin’ on me,” said he, “in the black of the night and I like an old tree beaten by the wind alone up here in the mountains? Yirra— God be wid the days, for the days are long and ’tis mighty little comfort a pore man like meself would be gettin’ out av them. Who will there be to lay me out and I slippin’ out av the world wid no priest to put his hands on me? O Almighty God, what would a man be doin’ in the darkness when the light av the day is gone?”

So he talked, rocking himself to and fro, his mind wrestling with the fatalism of death.

“You want a little spirit,” said I, “to get the blood warm in your veins—then you won’t be thinking so much about dying.”

“Is ut whisky ye mane?” he asked.

I nodded my head.

“An’ where would I be gettin’ the spirit from?” he asked me. “Isn’t the price of a bottle of that stuff what would keep me here in this cottage till to-morrow was a month?”

“You haven’t got any in the place?”

“I have not. Wouldn’t I be drinkin’ it now the way a cat ’ud lap milk out of a saucer?”

“I’ll go down to Araglin now, at once,” said I, “and get you some.”

“Six miles?” said he.

“Well—I’ll be back in an hour and a half. Put something round your shoulders and sit tight into the fire. It’s going to be a bitter night. You’ll want all the warmth you can get.”

He was gazing up at me in wonder, scarcely believing yet that I was going to do this thing for him. But when I went to die door, he realized that I was in earnest.

“May the blessin’ of God Almighty rest on ye,” said he, “and may all the hairs in yeer head turn into mold candles to light yeer soul to glory on the last day.”

With that blessing ringing in my ears, I closed the door behind me and set out in the driving rain down the mountain road to Araglin.

CHAPTER X

AS long as I live, I shall remember that night, not only when I climbed back up the mountain road, with the rain washing in torrents down the gutters it made for itself, but all the long hours afterwards till dawn. Yet they were not long hours to me. Never indeed will the hours of a night without sleep pass so swiftly by for me again.

It was after six o’clock when I started back from Foley’s public-house with the black bottle of whisky under my arm. The daylight was vanishing then in rents of orange across a sky of sullen gray. All of the men in the bar parlor of the inn told me it would be a fearsome night If the mists came up, they warned me, I might lose my way when I returned. But I had made the journey so often I had no fear of that.

As I climbed the mountain road with its loose stone wall on either side, where rock plants grew in company with numberless Irish ferns and harts-tongues thrusting' their leaves out of the crevices, I could hear the murmur of the wind rising away across the mountains to the west. It was like the cry of men far off in battle; men striving against the power of men in mighty anger. Malachi would have told me it was the voices of the hosts of the Sidhe as they sweep in their thousands down the passes of the untrodden hills.

I realized then how surely I was coming under the influence of these mountain visionaries, for every sound I heard, conveyed in the heart of it the likeness to some human note. A curlew cried across the moorland and it fell on my ears like the lonely cry of a child. And what child, they would have argued, could have found its way into the silences of those hills at such an hour? Then, as they reached their humble firesides, they would have told how the faerie children had been crying in the blackness of the storm. The very sound of it would have urged a speed into their feet as they toiled homewards. With the loneliness of that crying coming over me, I found myself quickening my own.

As I climbed over the wall of the road to reach the rough path through the heather, a donkey gathered itself hastily to its feet and hurried away with ears laid back into the darkness. My heart forgot its beating and then with a sudden leap in my breast, drove the hot blood burning to my cheeks. After a moment, I stumbled on, falling again and again over the roots of the heather, feeling the distance to be never so long as then, in the gloomy darkness of the over-riding night.

For seldom have I felt such desolation before. The deep gray moors and rising mountains stretched out around me like a deserted continent. Never a light was there, no sign of life but the wildest. The beating of an owl’s wings as it flew by me, its mournful cry dying away into the distance of the hills, was like the cry of a soul that is lost between the gulf of the worlds.

And all the time as I walked, my mind would picture for me that lake up in the hollow of the mountains, where, as Malachi had said, at night time, the souls of those the faeries have taken “do be flyin’ in crooked circles with the bats in the shadows of the hills.”

I struggled not to think of it, for those blade waters and ghostly echoing difis forced themselves in an impenetrable depression on my mind. My solitude in the midst of Nature bore down upon me then. I thought of a line from one of Anthony Sorel’s poems, so dearly expressing that utter melancholy which besets one:

When the earth is chill and one human stave
Of music would bring men from the grave.

He must have known those moments of solitude when he wrote that, such solitude I felt stealing through my flesh then as I made my way up into the mountains.

A fresh hope sprang up in me when I saw the flicker of light in Malachi’s cottage. For the moment, that was all I needed. The thought of my return I could put aside with the exquisite relief that sight of human habitation brought to me. Perhaps I could put it away the more easily, for in my bones was the sensation that I was not going to return that night.

I did not return. But little did I think of the thing that would detain me.

There was yet the best part of a mile to be walked before I could reach his door, but the warm flicker of that light put fresh heart into me. When a black dog slunk by me, quitting the path it was following and crouching past across the heather, it struck no note of fear in my mind. The poor beast was so apprehensive of ill-treatment at my hands that I stood for a moment to watch it, creeping away there into the darkness. It had given me a wide berth, cowering low to the earth with swift glances over its shoulder. Only when it was some distance past me did it return to the little beaten path through the heather. I whistled to it. You must know the loneliness and fear of a dog that is lost, what a piteous thing it is. In the belief that the kindness of a human voice can give them courage, a man must stop, no matter the night, no matter the weariness of his way.

I called to it, but it never paused in the direction it was going. A moment or so I watched it when at last it had faded away into the blackness of the night and I continued my way, thinking of the strange loneliness of that thing which God had made alive and how bitter a place for it the world must be on such a thankless night.

When I was within a quarter of a mile of Malachi’s cottage, the clouds blew over, leaving a rent in die heavens as brilliant as blade ice, from which the stars shone forth cold and dear, the one jeweled piece in that somber raiment of the sky. That clearing was not of long duration. In great folds of lightless, seamless gray, the heavy clouds swept on, with just this tear in the murky garment through which an instant later the light of the moon shot out. For that instant the wide stretches of heather, the broken boundary walls, the narrow passes between the hills and the uplifted mountains were all washed white in moonshine. From a place of gloomy foreboding, the wold had suddenly become one of passionate emotion. I gazed about me as one standing in a darkened gallery in whose hand, unawares, a flaming torch has been thrust. The earth glittered with light; it dazzled me. Before I could realize it all, the torch in my hand had flared, the rent was mended in the garment, the clouds had closed over the moon. I was in utter darkness once again with just the pin-pride of that orange light winking at me from the window of Malachi’s cottage.

I did not wait to knock upon the door, but just entered, once my Angers had found the latch. The rain was beginning to fall again and my clothes already were well drenched by it.

He was sitting there over the Are as I had left him, crumpled up with his knees against his chest, neither did he move from where he was, nor raise his head as I entered.

I closed the door and shut out the wind and rain behind me. I took off my coat and shook it before the fire. The rain flung from it hissing and spitting into the flames. Still he did not move.

“Do you feel any better?” I asked.

He moaned under his breath and I knew that the sickness of life was still with him. Then I searched the dresser for a cup, pouring some whisky into it and filling it with water from an old earthenware pitcher on the floor. There he kept the water he drew every morning from the spring that bubbled through the heather.

“Take a little of this,” said I. “Drink it all down —the whole lot of it if you can.”

His teeth chattered against the rim of the cup as he put it to his lips. Yet even before it was finished, it seemed his hand was steadier. Then he put his hand in his pocket and brought out a piece of dillisk—a seaweed they dry and bring up from the coast, selling it through the country. This he began chewing as though it were a quid of tobacco, his jaws working round and round like a cow chewing the cud.

It is hard to say what satisfaction they get out of this habit, for dillisk is like leather in the mouth and, to my unaccustomed palate, brought only the taste of the brine.

However the mere fact of him stirring himself to this extent, showed me that the spirit had taken its effect. He still had no inclination to talk and when a little later the storm broke in its full fury outside, the windows rattling and the old doors straining on their hinges as though some wild beast were trying to force an entrance, then he fell to shivering again and began once more to lament upon the loneliness of death.

I took the bottle off the floor and extracted the cork. He saw the movement and his eyes shot quickly out from the deep hollows where they lay.

“Is ut the way ye’ve got more of that stuff in there?” said he.

I told him the bottle was full, except for the quantity I had already given him. He looked at me, silently for a moment and in wonder.

“Glory be to God!” said he presently. “Didn’t ye pay a power of money for that?”

I told him how much it cost, at which he raised his eyes above him, staring for a while at the rafters below the thatch.

“Is it the way ye spent all that silver money to get me a drop that ’ud warm the blood in me and ye walking all the ways through the storm of the night?”

' He could scarcely believe that any human being could be so generous. It was not so much the journey I had made, for he merely added that as an afterthought. It was the spending of the money that seemed such a noble act to him, whereas, if I took any credit to myself, it was for walking that distance, as he said, in the storm of the night “Well—may the Almighty God heap blessin’s on ye,” said he, when at last he realized that the bottle was full and meant for him. “May the Almighty God 'send ye the power of good fortune and may ye walk in the land wid health and happiness on ye and all that belong to ye to the last day. Will ye pass the bottle across to me now, the way I can be helpin' meself when the sharp of that wind there gets into me blood?”

I swear I saw no harm in it. I swear that at that moment no thought of what Father Dorgan had said about him when he had drink taken, ever entered my mind. If he could get no warmth from his blood or from the fire that burned at his feet, it was artificial warmth that he needed. I handed the bottle across to him and he placed it down on the floor by his side.

I can remember now, as the recollection of that night comes back to me, how there were many things that he asked me to do about the room. One of the panes of glass in the window was broken, the rain came spitting through the jagged aperture. He asked me to put back the wad of brown paper which had been jammed there to keep out the draught. He asked me to count the chickens under the hatch of the old dresser, for that he believed one of them had strayed and was out, as he said, “in the black whirl of the storm.”

There were other things he pressed me to do for him and during all these moments of my occupation, he must have been filling his old cracked cup with the whisky I had brought from Foley’s public-house. However it was, in half-an-hour he was a different being. There needed no incentive from me to give him speech. He launched forth into the wildest extravagance of exhaustless narrative—tales of the faeries, of the strange happenings to men and women in those glens and valleys of the hills.

Never shall I remember them all; but the dim impression of their wild poetry remains with me now. Phrases of speech, instinct with an unfettered imagination, fell unhesitating from his lips. I can see his wrinkled face now as he sat there in the faint, warm light of the peat fire, while the storm outside rushed madly like some hunted thing through the hollows of the mountains. It was as the sound of a million men stampeding in the defeat of battle. At times, when the wind shrieked and howled through the faulty crevices of the doors, I heard as it were the crying of their voices in terror as they rushed ceaselessly by.

And there he sat, sometimes rocking himself to and fro as if to give measure to the monotony of his voice, his little eyes lit with unnatural flames, talking, endlessly telling his tales of the world, almost as though my existence was not conscious to his thoughts.

Then suddenly at the conclusion of a story he had related about that lake in the far hollows of Knockshunahallion, he looked across the red light of the fire at me and filled the cracked cup again.

“ ’Twas bi the edge of thim waters, they laid die hands on the young fella, an’ he with the black heart in him an’ his eyes struck wid the desolations of the world.”

It was Anthony Sorel he meant and this was the first time of his own account he had spoken of him.

I claim no indulgence for the thing I did, beyond the fact that at the moment I knew nothing of that empty bottle at his feet. It is excuse or no excuse, according to those who judge me, that I was so eager for the truth. But once he had spoken of Anthony Sorel of his own free will, then, controlling my eagerness, acting the lie that I did not care whether I heard it or not, I encouraged him to tell me more.

He was slow to begin, but when he had drunk more from the cracked cup in his hand, it was at last that he gave himself up to the pride of his story.

“ ’Twill be the Almighty God and He judging him whin the hosts do be blowin’ their trumpets on the last day.”

It was with these words that he ushered in his tale and there, in that wind-swept cottage in the mountains, with the storm hissing in the thatch and the raindrops spitting into the peat fire, till the long hours of night were treading on the heels of dawn, he told me the story of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine.

PART II

CHAPTER I

THERE came one day a young man to Araglin, from some foreign place, so the people said, and he paid money down to Michael Quinn for Heggarty’s cottage that had stood empty on the edges of Knockshunahallion ever since old Heggarty had died.

They talked of the wits having gone out of him and he paying good money for that hovel of a place, but Michael Quinn pocketed the gold and was known to have said,

“There are as many shillin’s in a gold coin that comes out av an old sow’s mouth as a man ’ud be findin’ in the mint itself.”

Who could deny the truth of that? But one and all, they declared he had got a great bargain for himself and there is no doubt he had.

The only expense to the vendor was the cost of a new thatching, part of the bargain entered into and drawn out by Quinn on a piece of paper he got from Jim Keane, the publican then in Araglin. For no sooner was the matter verbally agreed upon, than Quinn, who had once been involved in legal proceedings at the petty sessions court in Fer- moy, made eagerly to get the substance in writing, though he had never heard of an official stamp in his life.

The business was then concluded and a drop of bad whisky drunk by Quinn on the strength of it when once he had scratched his name across the piece of paper, well toiled by the exertions of his legal propensities.

“By this accordingly—" so the document was worded—“Michael Quinn agrees to hand over the cottage in the grip of the hills that was after being old Heggarty’s cottage and will do the same, having put a new thatch to it the way it will keep out the drift of the rain, for the sum of ten pounds which no man can say is not a fair price.”

It is interesting to see how the legal tone of die agreement quickly loses its flavor and falls away into the more human measure of speech. It is still more interesting to observe that last little touch of a pricking conscience, as though he anticipated the whole world’s criticism of his bargain and would have it in writing that he had dealt fairly by his man, however much they might declare in those parts to the contrary.

At the foot of this document, he scrawled his name, Michael Quinn, while below it, you will find the name, Anthony Sorel, in tiny letters that would need almost a magnifying glass to decipher them.

“ ’Twas himself didn’t want the world to be knowin’ he’d put his name to a dirty bargain,” they said in Araglin when they saw the signature. Michael Quinn could answer nothing to that.

But if they supposed that Anthony Sorel thought he had made a bad settlement, they were much mistaken. He bought some little furniture in Fer-moy and settled himself down in this thatched cabin in the heart of the mountains, much as a man who, long riding the stretches of the implacable sea, comes before the Winter storms into the peace of the harbor.

It was the month of November when he came and the winds of God were seeking out the mountain crevices and the clouds were wrapping the passes of Knockshunahallion in a seamless garment of gray. The nights were falling quickly with impenetrable darkness. Even the sea-gulls came inland so far to haven from the Atlantic storms. In the daytime, far down in the valleys, they could be seen like fluttering pieces of whitest paper blown in the wake of the plowman’s team.

There was not one amongst the people of those parts but who believed that Anthony Sorel would be gone from his cabin before the Winter was past.

“Is it stay up there in the wrath of the mountains,” they said—“an’ he havin’ the white of death already in his face?”

That was what they said, but they were all wrong. An unearthly pallor there may have been in his cheeks when first he came to Knockshunahallion, but it was not the whiteness of death. There was an eager virility in that slim body of Anthony Sorel’s which none of them had taken into account.

When even a month had gone by, the mountain winds had burnt a faint color into his face, burnished a brighter light in his eyes. Those who met him then, tramping the half-trodden paths through the heather, would scarcely have believed him to be the same man when once the old year had shot its bolt and the new year had lifted the latch.

Twice every week he came down those four miles into the village to buy food, bread and butter and tea; sometimes fish when die men came out in their little rail carts from the coast. In the stony piece of land that was tilled behind his cottage, he said, he was going to sow his own potatoes in the Spring.

It was the postman, bringing the letters—a lonesome walk, those three miles over the moors from Ballydufi—who first told the people that Anthony Sorel was one of those who made songs and had the beauties of the world in the tips of his fingers. They never said any more after that about the Winter driving him out of die mountains, because they knew that a man who made songs and could see die beauty of the world, would find such beauties in those hills as that he could never wish to leave them.

It was in time, when the Spring was coming round, when the first buds of the mountain ashes were fairly brushed with green and the larks rose in sudden upward flights out of the heather, such time as that it was when people about began to have some awe and great respect for him. And as the months went by, there were men in the cottages who could say his poems off by heart.

They knew him all about; for lonely though he was up there in that cabin of his in the grip of the hills, he would come down to the quiet farms and to the cottages that lie in the valleys, as the toys of a child lie in a woman’s lap, and there he would sit with them, talking at their firesides.

All the folk-lore and the tales of the faeries’ enchantment, he heard in this way from the people themselves. Much of the poetry he wrote came first from their lips.

It was when they waked Mary Dorgan, that black night in March, he first read one of his poems, as they sat about the room with the coffin lonely on the table and the two candles burning with shrouds of wax at her feet.

There was a strange note of remoteness in his voice as he read. He allowed himself but little variety of intonation, and yet the tone of it was sweet, in brighter moments like die running of a mountain stream under the moss, in solemn cadences as the wind that threatens the hills before even the storm is near. He read for die beauty of the words alone and would not distract the ear with that emotional appeal of the actor to the senses.

"Catch up the garments of your night
Embroidered with its stars,
And look not neither to the left nor right,
Nor heed the flaming scimitars.
Set out with quiet feet and noble heart;
Death has commanded you shall take your part.

Pluck you a thomed hazel twig
And shake the blossoms free;
The very hour itself is big
With your soul’s destiny.
Girdle your faith and be as fifty men
That march to battle in the hollow glen.

Bring you no tears, the dew will fall
To wet the path you go;
And you will hear the curlews call
Across the moors below.
The flame-flies shall burn candles in the grass
To light your silent footsteps as you pass.”

There is much honor for that man in Ireland who can make songs. So from amongst the people there, who lived in the sight of Knockshunahallion, there came great honor to Anthony Sorel. Wherever he went, there was a welcome for him—a cup of milk, a piece of griddle bread, a seat by the peat fire. And as time went by, the reverence of mystery grew about his name.

“We’ve a mystery man up there in the mountains,” they said, “an’ he singin’ his songs through the watch of the night”

No one knew how he lived. In time, no one asked. Once every month, he walked the long road across the moors into Ballyduff, took die train to Lismore but was not seen there by the townspeople, except when he arrived and, after three days, when he returned. But in Lismore itself, he wasted no moment, was come there and was gone; was come again and then again returned to Ballyduff, from whence he walked back over the windy moors to his cabin in the mountains.

Some supposed him rich—some poor. None of them knew. Even when Shauneen Troy climbed up into the mountains, one of those days when Anthony Sorel had gone away, and peered in through the window of his cottage, he learnt but little for his daring to tell them down in the valley below.

There was the old bed built into the wall, just as Heggarty had died in it—“But weren’t the clothes on it white,” said Shauneen—“the way he might have stole the cloth off the altar; an’ wasn’t there a robe over it all of the colors of the world, the Pope might have on his shoulders an’ he sittin’ on the holy chair of Rome itself?”

Quite possibly this was a patchwork quilt cast over the bed and likely to bring great wonder to strange eyes that had never seen its like before. Shauneen made the most of it, for he had no other news to tell. The light from that wide window had but faint power to illuminate the room within. He could not see how simple the furniture in the place might be, so he colored everything with the light of the patchwork quilt, speaking of great chairs that kings might sit in and twenty high candlesticks of polished brass when he had seen but two.

The only thing, a Russian crucifix, set with all the barbarous beauty of rough-cut stones, a thing he might have talked about with bated breath, he caught no sight of. It stood in a niche of die wall by the open chimney and none besides Anna Quartermaine ever beheld it there.

Here then and in this fashion, Anthony Sorel lived in the lonesomeness of the hills while a year drew by. There was no more heard of his fearing the wrath of the mountains after that and no longer did they talk of the white of death in his face.

By many gentle things, he endeared himself to those about him. When old James Cotter was thrown from his horse on the Clogheen road, it was Anthony Sorel himself who sat by his bedside while two days were going in and out and but for him, they said, the old man would have got his death at that time.

Yet notwithstanding all his familiarity with the people, there never departed from him that sense of mystery. Often when the heavy dews were falling and the long evenings of the summer were dropping into night, a herdsman late coming from his flocks in the hills, would find Anthony Sorel walking alone, long distances from his cabin on Knockshunahallion. Because of the songs he made, perhaps, too because of his solitary life up there in the mountains, they said he talked with the faeries. They whispered that he had some spell against their charms by which none of them could take him to themselves.

So he lived, close against the face of Nature, till one Spring had gone by and yet another Spring with its racing clouds and bursts of sunshine was dressing die mountains in their purple robes. Then again the air was filled with the beating of birds’ wings and the hum of bees. Up into the heavens the larks soared, bearing the burden of their quivering music into the clearer light. The stone-chats set about their building under the mountain stones. All day long rose the far, faint bleating of the mountain sheep, calling their errant young. The Winter mists were swept away; the valleys stretched out their arms to the awakening sun once more and then it was that Anthony Sord first met Anna Quartermaine.

CHAPTER II

OFTEN, with sly laughter, like children cunning in their ways, the old folk teased Anthony Sorel because he lived alone in his cabin up in die mountains.

“One fine day,” they said, “ ’tis yourself will be takin’ a shtrapping young girrl up there to the mountains, and ye makin’ die songs to her through the long nights. Shure, wouldn’t ye be as mean as bog-water, keepin’ that bed to yeerself with all the young men about gone foreign and not one but yeerself to marry a dacint girrl that ’ud be lookin’ sideways at any young fella walkin’ the roads.”

At the cross roads indeed, whenever a fiddler came those ways and they would be dancing till the night was dark, there was many a young girl casting her daring eyes at Anthony Sorel while he stood by the loose stone wall watching them. Was it not he who could make the songs of die mountains and is there not in the breast of every woman some voice that calls her to the singers of the world?

Indeed a woman may well and fondly love die man who woos her with the light of batde in his eyes, who wins her with the strength of victory in his arms. Like a mother she will dress his wounds and bathe his forehead with her tears. Then it is as to a child she gives her love, knowing that, as a child, to just one word of hers he will obey.

But it is the man of dreams, of unknown passions and mysterious moods, to whom for deeper sorrow or for greater joy she gives the secret of her soul. His songs can waken her to unsuspected depths; his hidden thoughts are always riddles for her watching eyes. She never knows the man he may not be and never can with all enchantments wholly enslave his mind. He is no child, obedient to her voice, but with some strange elusiveness always evades her when she thinks to hold him fast. And so because it is not easy victory she asks, this is the man whose eye arrests hers in a world of men.

Perhaps it is the priest in him, vowed celibate against the' flesh, that urges on the conflict in her soul. She questions the youth and beauty in her face that cannot bring him pleading to her feet and seeks to gain from him the very passions that she scorns in coarser men. That strange aloofness in his eyes, spurs on her spirit to the sterner quest. It is the marble that her blood would warm, towards which her nature leans to kindle the lire of life.

In all unconsciousness no doubt, yet still in such a mind, the young girls glanced at Anthony Sorel when they saw him at the cross ways, or met him walking by the road. The death of Maggie Donovan in the mountain lake was told at night about their firesides and many a one of them could see in Anthony Sorel, him that came down the heather path, playing the sound of the winds in the reed between his lips. And not one alone, but many as they lay awake in the darkness would find imagination to believe that such a death could bring its joys to them.

Yet he looked at none but with the eyes that see beyond, until it grew to be much spoken of that he had visions coming to his sight; that in his cabin where the winds meet in the hills, he could call forth the souls of die departed dead and hear their messages from the other world.

Amongst such a people as those in Ireland, with all the riot of their imagination running wild, it is not difficult to understand how legend and mysterious tales should gather about such a man. And yet he moved amongst them, reading his songs at their humble firesides, listening to their stories of the faeries, and all in that lonely simplicity of life it seemed so strange a man should choose for his expression.

It was in the Spring of his second year on Knock-shunahallion that Anna Quartermaine came out of Ballysaggartmore, walking up into the mountains. She went by the road that passes through Feagarrid, swinging her body to a tireless step as she walked, with Michael, an Irish terrier, trotting at her heels.

An open eye and dear she had for the beauties of the world that stretched before her. There was not a lark that rose or a curlew that called but what her eyes had seen, her ear had heard. Sport there was too for that devil Michael when once they came to the moors. She carried a whip in her hand, but it was her voice that brought him in to heel.

When at Foildarrig, she left the road and set across the moors to join the road again past Doon. Then she unpinned the hat from her head and let the winds of that Spring morning blow their scent of heather through her hair.

So she was walking, humming that music of a heart glad of the day, when she first met Anthony Sorel.

He was lying out on a flat table of rock, his elbows raised on it, supporting his face in his hands. Below him stretched the theater of the hills and all the valley with its patchwork fields of luminous green.

There was a murmur of life in the heather; there was the first sharp warmth of Spring in the sun. It was a day for lovers in that magic world and yet, when Michael stood with his front paws raised upon the rock in eager curiosity, the man looked at the dog and not at her.

She called him back to her heels as she passed, knowing, as women do, without observing, that she had pitched her voice upon its sweetest note. Then it was he looked, as she had meant he should, when in his eyes she saw that far aloofness which only could explain his presence in so wild a world alone.

On his head too there was no covering. His black hair was blown, disordered on his forehead, and he lying there like a man at rest at the noon of the day. She looked for that satchel on the shoulder, proving him one of those strange pedestrians you meet the world over, who seem from choice to face the road alone. But there was none. Realizing that he was no man of those parts, notwithstanding the untidy condition of his clothes, there was yet the suggestion to her mind as she glanced at him that he was no stranger to that corner of the world.

These are the instincts, and God knows how, that lead a woman to the truth. Was it the attitude in which he lay, the easy posture of his slim figure? She would have been the first to swear she did not know how she came by that conviction. A conviction it was; for when she had passed out of sight round a bend of the hills, she too seated herself in such position as that if he left his table rock she could observe which way he went. This was curiosity; that spirit that stirs within a woman long time before she knows she is awake.

Well into an hour she sat there wondering would he ever go and then, when at last her patience was exhausted, with sudden impulse she retraced her steps. It was not that she knew what she was going to do. Women do not know, do not set their minds to this or that, or if they should, are never prepared to do it.

When once again she turned the comer and found him still lying on his table rock, there rose conviction, now doubly sure, he was no man of those parts. But had he shown the wish to speak, then there had been no echoing wish in her. For a woman knows that wish in a man far sooner than he dreams he has the courage to attempt it. Had that wish been there in Anthony Sorel at that moment, she would have passed him by with a light in her eyes, a certain poise of the head, which would have given him his answer before he asked it.

But there was none of this. She felt he almost resented her intrusion. And when he looked at her, it was as one who saw her in perspective with that vast outline of the hills when she would have had no other object for his eyes but her.

So this it was that prompted her, urged her it would seem almost to attitude of defiance. Before she knew the cunning of her tongue or had designed the gentle defenselessness of her pose, she had stopped and spoken as she passed.

“I hope I don’t disturb you,” she said, “but can you tell me how I can get back to the road to Ballysaggartmore? I’ve been wandering about here for the last hour almost and I can’t find a path.”

Not consciously did she strike the note of helplessness in her voice, but there it was and, hearing the echoes of it in her ears, she knew that, had she been a man, she could not have resisted it.

“The way you came,” said he, “will take you back.” He raised himself and pointed to the south. “Ballysaggartmore is over there.”

Two things there were that fastened themselves upon her mind, the quality of his voice and, as he pointed the way across the moors, the wonderful refinement of his hands. Both were strange and unexpected in such a man in such a place. Curiosity became a conscious emotion in her then and, notwithstanding the finality of his information, she still lingered there, pursuing the swift impressions that sped across her mind.

The first words then that came to her, she spoke, determining to force him into conversation that she might hear his voice again; resolving in herself to conquer his impenetrable reserve.

"And which way is Foildarrig?” she asked.

"Foildarrig is down there in the valley—the group of cottages close to that belt of trees.”

Still he was looking at her when he spoke, as if she were no more than a part of the world his eyes were compassing. Where was her beauty then? she asked herself.

When the issue between human beings is in the balance, no one knows swifter than a woman when her looks are put upon the scales. He had not so much as taken them to account; yet there she stood below him, with the wind blowing through the loose tresses of her hair, tinting her cheeks with that glow no art can imitate, knowing that if ever she had beauty it was with her then. This was driving her and almost in self-defense, as though each uncomprehending glance of his was an attack.

“Do you know this part of the world well?” she asked, the very difficulty encouraging her to her purpose.

“I live here,” said he.

“Here?” She looked about her, across the long slopes of the hills, the wide stretches of the heather, the stray thorn trees bent and twisted by the prevailing winds. “Here?” she repeated. “Where?” By a motion of his hand, he lifted her eyes to the mountains above.them.

“On a sort of plateau up there,” said he, “there’s a small cottage. It’s mine.”

“And you live there?”

“I do ”

“All the year round?”

“All the year round.”

“Not by yourself?”

“Yes—by myself.”

“Whatever for?”

“One must live somewhere.”

“Yes—but surely you choose company, don’t you?” “I have company.”

“Whose?”

There she stopped. An expression she could not read as yet had swept into the sensitive lines of his face. It might well have been displeasure at her questioning. She hastened to make amends.

“Please forgive me,” she said quickly. “I’m very rude—aren’t I?”

“Why should you say it’s rude to be curious?” he replied. “Everyone is curious. We cease to live when we cease to have curiosity.”

She looked up to his table of rock and she smiled.

“But you’re not curious.”

“Oh—yes, I am,” said he—“thank God, full of curiosity.”

“Not about me.”

She remembered afterwards, indeed she was conscious of it then, how he looked down at her as though aware of her personality for the first time.

“No,” he replied slowly. “Isn’t it a waste of time to be curious about people?”

This was a strange point of view. That none of them ever fulfilled her expectations had not deterred her from being curious about people all her life. Yet strange as it was, it did not sound unexpected from him. Her mind did not even take offense at it, when from some other man she would intentionally have sought the personal implication.

“I don’t find it a waste of time,” was all she said.

There followed a silence and in that silence had his eyes been upon her, she would have let it continue. But when she looked up again, he was gazing away to the high peak of Knockshunahallion where a white cloud, dropped down from the blue heavens, was brushing the crest with a fringe of mist.

“Why do you think it is?” she continued.

It was his reluctance that was stimulating to her and it was not the reluctance of one who will not be engaged, but of a mind engrossed with things beyond her comprehension. She felt she was against some barrier that human nature had never confronted her with before, which all the desire in her was leaping up to overcome. It was only by keeping her eyes fixed upon his face, she felt she could bring him to the consciousness of her question, and when at last he did answer, it was slowly made, as though he had left another world to speak to her.

“Because people come and go,” he said. “That’s why it seems to me a waste of time to be curious about them. So much as they touch your own life and become for a time a part of it, they have all the meaning that, people can have in the world and curiosity won’t help you to find out what that meaning is. You’ll discover it, a thing growing in and completing the growth of your own—soul.” He spoke that word with hesitation, as though she might misunderstand his use of it. “They set you back or help you onwards. The people you imagine and make in your own mind have more power of uplifting than any you meet in the flesh.”

“Is that what you’re doing, up there on your perch of rock—dreaming about people you’ve never met?”

For the first time he smiled and she saw the hidden charm in him.

“I was not aware that I was doing anything,” said he. “I’ve been here for an hour before you came.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing. Watching those lapwings down in the valley—listening to that lark. Every quarter of an hour, he makes a new flight up into the heavens. I don’t know what I’ve been doing. Look at those clouds gathering over the Galtee mountains. It’s something to watch them, isn’t it? In an hour’s time their shadows will be chasing across the moors.”

She looked at him in growing interest, uncertain how to understand the things he said. For though in any other place, there might have seemed extravagance in the sound of his speech, yet there and in the simple manner in which he spoke, everything he said seemed to have a truer meaning.

“You’re a queer person to meet—like this,” she said and candidly, for the first time unconsciously losing the woman in her and speaking just as one human being to another—as travelers speak, wending their ways along the same road. Indeed, either because of him, or despite herself, she had taken off that garment of femininity in which she had been wrapped. The knowledge that he was a man and she was a woman and that there they were alone in the wild passes of those hills was swiftly dropping from her. It was the aloofness of his mind she knew had brought about the change. So she could come to candor and, undisguised, speak the passage of her thoughts.

“You’d be the same as I am,” said he, “if you lived up here in the sounds and silences of the mountains. I’m not queer—only to you. I’m not queer to myself or to all those people who live in the farms and the cottages you see dotted about down there in the valley. At least—I don’t think I am. I know they believe that I talk with the faeries and do all sorts of strange things in my little cabin up there— but after all that’s not so queer a thing to them.

They see faeries. There’s scarcely one of the old people about here who hasn’t seen some evidence of them one way or another. If you know the country hereabouts at all, you know that about them. Oh—

I’m not queer-” He raised himself on the slab of rock and jumped down into the heather by her side. “You think about it—wherever you’re going to be to-night and if you’re going to be alone—you think about it. I’m not queer.”

He had not hat to raise that he might bid her farewell, but a faint smile came across his eyes as he turned away. So there she stood watching him as he climbed up the side of the mountain, then he turned upon the slope of the hill and was gone.

CHAPTER III

IT may not have entered Anthony Sorel’s mind when he bid Anna Quartermaine think about him that night, that she would so implicitly have obeyed. Despite herself, the thoughts were forced upon her and all the way back across the moors her mind ran upon little else.

Who was he? Why did he live alone there in the stillness and in the wrath of those mountains? Was there madness in him—had he lost the gift of his wits? So common a thing is that solitary madness in Ireland—sane enough to evade the meaning of the Asylums Act—that it seemed a supposition reasonable enough when first her mind encountered it. Yet even that did not hold weight with her for long. He did not look as those witless creatures look. However distant it may have been, there was direction in his eyes. The lapwings hovering in the valley far below, the clouds in their cumulus banks over the Galtee mountains, as he had said, it was doing something to watch them. Perhaps the thing she would have done herself, though with less meaning than he seemed to derive from so indefinite an occupation.

No, that was not madness, she thought. Even when he spoke of the faeries, saying, as though it were the most ordinary fact in the world, that the old people had evidence of them, it was not as one who believes in the widessness of his imagination. She could bring no conviction to her mind that his wits were gone. So far and no farther her thoughts had brought her when at evening she came bade to the big house in Ballysaggartmore.

Then, as her custom often was, when her mind was resdess and she felt the solitude of the place about her, she sent for Father Nolan to take his evening meal with her.

These invitations came always full of welcome to the parish priest. There were not many diversions in that neighborhood of Ballysaggartmore, and in no parish that he had ever known, he often said it, was there a woman of such attraction and intelligence as Anna Quartermaine.

Though every week she made her confession to him in the cramped confessional of their little chapel, it was never, he felt, the woman who came to him, only that ordered creature with the human sins of omission and commission, obedient in mind to the regulations of her church, but ever with the spirit of insurrection holding about her the garb of mystery that she wore.

The more she told him in confession, the less he knew of her when he met her in the world, wherefore, having no shame of his manhood as a priest, these little invitations to the big house—always sudden and unexpected—were never refused by him. She gave him good wine. She could talk and with such experience of the world as in no woman he had ever met. Whenever she returned from her travels abroad, she entertained him with stories from every country she had visited. Full of that quaint observation, intelligent women have, of the unexpected details of life, she could be witty, instructive, and of absorbing interest Those little things which by right she should have told him in the confessional, she let fall in the casual course of their conversation. His eyes were keen enough to see through that In the confessional there might have been forced upon her the little necessities of explanation; but at the dinner table, good manners forbade his questioning whereby the woman in her escaped detection. With all the wit of a clever tongue, with expressions too that swiftly came, inviting confidence, and as swiftly went when she deemed she had said enough, she made her advance, she effected her retreat. The next instant the woman of whom she had accorded him that transitory glimpse, was gone.

So it was when Father Nolan received her invitation on that still Spring evening, he went to the door of his room and called at once to his housekeeper. "Let ye eat the chop,” said he, “and don’t be cookin’ but half the potatoes, I’m goin’ to have me dinner at the big house.”

There was always a warm sense of satisfaction within him when he made that announcement. He knew with what respect it was received in the kitchen; how it would be well across the village before the night had fallen. To add to the warmth of it, he took her note from its envelope and read it through once again.

There is a place laid for you this evening and an empty chair for you to fill.

That was all. This second time as he read it, he smiled. The brevity, the precision, the confident expectation, they were all so characteristic of her. He knew so well what she would say were he to refuse, the look of astonishment that would come into her face, the countless ways she would punish him for that declining, with the ready assumption to her mind that he had something better to do. But he never refused and short of die extreme exigencies of his calling, she never expected that he would.

Having thrust the letter back again into his pocket, therefore, he reached down his old silk hat from its peg in the hall, looked at his hands and shook his head when on any other occasion he would have pronounced them "dean enough,” and, opening the door, he set out down die street to the big house, hiding in its belt of trees on the outskirts of the village.

"I’ll wash me hands and I gettin’ there,” said he.

On those occasions, when there was no other company, he was shown into a little boudoir next to the dining-room and, much as he liked company, being a native of his land, he preferred these quiet evenings alone with her who was company enough for any man.

The servant dosed the door quietly behind him as he crossed to the fireplace and sat down, preparing for those long moments of anticipation which he knew her unvaried habit it was to keep him waiting.

Seven-thirty were the figures she had written at the foot of her sheet of notepaper. According to a little enameled dock on the mantelpiece, it was five-and-twenty to eight. He folded his hands on his lap and stared into the fire.

He was not a young man; he was not an old. That age he was, so she often told him, when a man can keep his illusions about Romance and yet be sensible with women. That was her way of putting it and invariably she would make it the more personal by assuring him how impersonal it was. Indeed she was the only woman he knew, who constantly reminded him that he was vowed to Holy Orders and that by ostensibly helping him to forget it.

He had never told her his age. He had never told it to anyone. He was fifty-three; indeed just that age when a man volunteers no unnecessary information about it. He was handsome to look at; handsome in that ascetic way which is one of the two types you find amongst the priests of Ireland. There are no intermediary types. The Church breeds but two classes of men only. He was of the class that finds promotion and, had he been on good terms with his bishop, would never have remained in Ballysaggartmore.

There was a kindly humor in his eyes when his mind was engaged in conversation. In repose they had that far inward look which belongs to the visionary when it does not belong to the Church. His cheek bones were high, his thin lips sometimes twisting humorously, sometimes drooping to that sudden sadness which is so innate in the race. He was tall and slight, a slimness of figure that went far to conceal his age. Indeed he was a man of pleasing appearance. It is doubtful if Anna Quartermaine would have had him so often to her table unless. For this certainly was characteristic of her. She was a beautiful woman who neither needed, nor could endure the contrast of ugliness about her. All the servants at the big house were chosen as much for their looks as their ability.

“There’s no need for people to be ugly,” she said, “and when they are, there’s still less need to look at them. That’s why you come here to dine with me so often,” she said to Father Nolan. “I couldn’t bear it if you were ugly. But you’ve got such a nice ascetic old face that I like looking at it.”

So she reminded him of his Holy Orders in the same breath that she persuaded him to forget them. No man objects to that.

The enameled dock on the mantelpiece was just drawing its breath to strike the hour of eight when the door opened, wakening him from the reverie into which he had fallen.

He rose to his feet and turned round. She stood in the doorway in a light dinner gown, perfectly draped about her. First she smiled. This was her apology. Then she said,

“I’m not late—am I? Say I’m not late.”

He said she was not, knowing that this was the form of apology expected from him to set her mind at rest.

CHAPTER IV

THEY sat down for dinner to the table where four shaded candles were burning in tall Queen Anne silver candlesticks. This was the only light in the room; strange illumination in those days when a brilliantly lighted table was considered beautiful.

They had it in Ballysaggartmore that Anna Quartermaine took all her meals in the dark and sat in the dark too by herself at nights in the big room that looked over the mountains.

“An’ wouldn’t that be queer,” they said, “for one as handsome as herself?” By which it must be supposed they meant she was hiding her beauty.

But Anna Quartermaine knew better than to hide her beauty; she knew better than to be too generous with it. Whatever he may have thought of those shaded lights as means of illumination, Father Nolan always came away from the big house with the impression of a man who has been in the presence of beauty rather than of one who has had it thrust upon his sight.

On that Spring evening, he sat down to table, conscious that there was some purpose in his being asked there and equally content to wait until she saw fit to tell him what it was. Quite possibly he may have imagined its substance; some little thing, as so frequently happened, of which she had no desire to unburden herself in the confessional, some twinge of the conscience which could not be construed into a measure requiring absolution; some intention upon which her mind was already set, yet for which she needed the warrant of his approval.

These were the subtle and feminine motions of her mind which required far more delicate treatment than the open admission of venial sins in the confessional. He was used to such dealings with her. So far as it is possible for a man to understand, he knew the directions of her mind.

“My spiritual adviser—” so she sometimes addressed him, half in jest, half in earnest; and in such capacity it was often when her determination was set upon a certain course that she called him to her, conjuring cunningly from his lips his approval of the thing she meant to do. So many times had her tricks deceived him, that he had become wary of die fascination of her craft. This evening he set to his meal in silence, as though to share her food was the only purpose of her invitation.

“Have you got nothing to say?” she said at last.

He looked up humorously from his plate.

“Plenty,” said he—“but ’tis nothin’ so good as ye might be saying yeerself.”

“How do you know I’ve got anything to say?”

“Didn’t ye ask me here to take the dinner with ye?”

She laughed and the shaded light of those four candles all added to the mystery of her laughter.

"You're a dear thing," said she. "You know me very well—don’t you?”

This was one of her guiles, a doak thrown across his eyes, all embroidered with the charm of that term of endearment. He knew what it meant. It meant that he knew her so well that his eyes were blinded to what she really was, to what she had fully made up her mind to be.

"Go on," he said smiling. "What is it ye've got to say?”

And when, in the simplest voice in the world, she assured him that quite honestly there was nothing, what else was there to do but for him to believe her? It was then, but not till then that she proceeded with all her subtleties to tell him what it was; not that he might know, when all the telling had been made, but that she could obtain from him whatever expression of opinion she might need. This much, however, must be said for him; he had his shrewd suspicion he was being so dealt with— the vague impression, but no more.

Yet notwithstanding that shrewd suspicion, her first question came upon him utterly unawares. Resting her cheek in her hand and, beneath the glow of those shaded candles, setting her eyes to . his, she said,

“Do you believe in the faeries?"

He laid down his knife and fork and met her eyes with his astonishment.

“Now, in the name of the Almighty God," said he, "why are ye asking me a thing like that?”

“The people about here believe in them,” said she—“the old people do.”

“They do indeed.”

“Well—don’t you tell them how foolish it is?” “Shure, why would I?”

He was beginning to lose all consciousness of that shrewd suspicion. She had this quality. She could always distract his mind with the interest of what she said.

“Why would I?” he repeated. “Shure, what harm are they doing believing in the faeries? Didn’t old Mary Quinn the other day go down on her two knees bended and implore me the way I’d sprinkle the room of her cottage with Holy Water an’ she kept wakin’ at nights by the noises they made, singing and dancing till her ears were deafened with it?” “What were the noises? Did you find out?”

“I did not. ’Twas in her ears she heard them, not in mine.”

“Well—did you sprinkle the Holy Water?”

“I did not, of course.”

“Why not?”

“Shure what would herself be saying about us if I brought her the Holy Water and never a sound of their dancing went out of her head from that day to this?”

“You don’t believe there was anything in it then?” “Shure, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve no doubt there was something the pore woman heard in her ears. Didn’t I send the doctor to have a look at her?” “What did he say?”

“He said 'twas not in her ears at all—but her mind had it, the way she could describe the pattering of their feet and even repeat some of the songs they sang—and she no poet, mind ye, to be inventing the things she said. ‘ ’Tis no matter for the priest,’ said I—‘an’ ’tis no matter for the doctor,’ says he, for ye couldn’t put a woman like that into an asylum an’ she just hearing the noise of music ye couldn’t hear yeerself.”

Something in the reserve of his speech committed him to a belief he would not openly subscribe to. She sat there at the end of the table, watching him as he continued with his meal, all the lighter spirit of her manner gone, and in its place a gentle seriousness that softened to a shadow in her eyes.

“You don’t think she was mad?” she asked presently.

He looked up at her, knowing in the cadence of her voice, in the gentled expression of her face, that all subtlety had gone from her; that now she was truly herself, disrobed of all the secreting garments of her sex. Why this subject had brought her such a mood was beyond his understanding. He had seen it in her before. Once, when she had believed she was in love, she had given him this glimpse of her real self, a prey to emotion, her spirit striving for those upward and exalted flights of the mind where no reason or quality of the intelligence could follow.

But in all the course of his knowledge of her, she had never spoken of the faeries before. When he brought his eyes back to the plate before him, he still was at a loss to understand this sudden inclination of her thoughts.

“Do you think she was mad?” she repeated, when her question remained still unanswered.

“I do not,” said he—“no more than there are times when I’m mad and ye’re mad. Shure, don’t they say about here that ’tis queer ye are yeerself an’ ye never marrying any man at all.”

“Do they say that?”

She smiled, but with an odd humor, not of laughter, in her face.

“They do indeed,” said he.

“Do you think I’m queer?”

He looked up with a laugh in his eyes.

“Well now—what do ye want me to say to that?” he asked.

“Just what you think.”

“Well—then, I suppose I do.”

“Why?”

He knew just how carefully this question must be answered and debated some moments before he spoke. But she was eager to know. She could not wait long to be told.

“Why?” she said again—and again, “Why?”

“Well—aren’t there many men have asked ye?” said he.

“Yes—many.”

Indeed there were many in his knowledge alone. She never had any wish to hide them from him. “There was a man—he was in love with me by the way—” so she ushered in many a story for his hearing. Knowing her friendship for him there were not a few who had admitted as much to him themselves, begging for his intercession, seeking his counsel. To one and all of them, he had said the same thing.

“Anna Quartermaine,” said he, “will do what she wants to, when she knows what it is.’’

“Don’t ye think, then, that ye’re queer yeerself,” said he, “an’ ye refusing them all?”

She leant back in her chair, all interest of the meal lost in this of more absorbing moment. It was a charming egotism. There was no discussion she liked so well as an argument about herself, setting forth her virtues as best became them, admitting her faults with a fascinating reluctance; making voluntary confessions of the creature she was, and always with the same naive conclusion, “Don’t you know that about me?”

The parish priest knew this mood in her well and never made endeavor to discourage it. Some new feature of herself he learnt on every occasion when it was displayed; yet never did she admit so much as gave him power to penetrate the mystery of her sex. With it all, she still remained the woman no man can see or understand.

Such a mood she was entering upon now. With every interest awake in him, he anticipated it. There were ways of encouraging her, and he knew them well. Finding her eyes lost in that contemplation which sees no barrier to the limitations of one’s surroundings, he urged her with yet another question. But there was no emphasis in his voice. He spoke quite gently as one who wakes a sleeper from his dreams.

“I suppose ’tis the way ye’ve never found a man to yeer liking?”

She glanced up at that, when he could see how he had struck a note which vibrated.

“There are so many men,” she said—“and so many me’s. That’s what’s the matter. The tinker, the tailor, the soldier, the sailor and so on and so on—the beggarman and thief—do you understand?”

He nodded his head.

“There’s never been a chemist in love with me though.”

“Why a chemist?”

“Well—” she was half teasing, but half she meant the spirit of what she said—“You never know. Think if the whole world became too difficult, what a wonderful potion a chemist could give you—if he were in love.”

Father Nolan smiled at her, not altogether in laughter. Despite himself he had caught the note of meaning in her voice.

“Do ye think he would give it ye,” said he, “if the young man were in love?”

“But of course,” she said, “that ’ud be the only way he could prove it. What would be the good of his being a chemist, if he wouldn’t do that?”

“Rather a penalty for the pore man,” said he.

“But isn’t there always a penalty?” she replied and little knew die truth she said. “If I love a soldier, he must be a soldier and the greatest glory a soldier can have is to die fighting. That’s why I don’t want to marry a soldier. It’s no good marrying a man if you’re going to lose him. I want to keep the thing I love—don’t you know that about me?”

He laid down his knife and fork and broke into laughter. There was the charm of something irresistible in her folly, perhaps because there was more than mere folly to it all. She was not only talking of herself now. She was voicing one of the hidden secrets of her sex.

“Supposing ye didn’t lose him?” said he. “It isn’t all soldiers die that way. Indeed ’tis a good many would be surprised to hear they had a chance of it. Wasn’t there an officer I knew in the North Cork Militia and didn’t he get his death with a cold, waiting for a lady at the corner of Patrick’s Bridge and she never turning up for him till the rain had drenched the coat on him and Mangan’s clock pointed to an hour after the rime she said she’d be there? Shure, what’s wrong with a soldier beyond the chances of his getting shot, if he’ll come by his death like that for a woman? What was the matter with Major Allen, except that he was an Englishman, mind ye? Was there e’er a man ye’d have more right to call a man, than that fella? Didn’t he stand six foot two in his stocking vamps and wasn’t he as handsome as an Apollo in a hateful red tunic? Didn’t he almost lose his wits about ye and shure what was the matter with him?”

He had dropped his voice to a gentler note, knowing that he spoke of one of those tender incidents in her life for which memory still chastised her with sudden lashes of regret.

“What was the matter with him?” she repeated— “just that he wasn’t a tinker or a tailor or a beggar-man or a thief—that’s all. He was a soldier—just a soldier. And he was fond of me—wasn’t he? You know that. But when I first met him, I thought I loved soldiers—then after a time I got so tired of them. Life would have become a regiment of days if I’d married him. We should have trooped our colors till they were in rags. Why must a man be anything? Why can’t he be everything? Spiritual adviser—I shall never marry. There are too many men in the world and they’re all something different. And if I married one, I should be bound to see something in the other that I wanted. Come along .—let’s go into the other room. That’s why I’m queer. Tell them that if they ever ask you. I wonder would they ever understand it.”

She rose from her chair and led the way into the little room beyond. There, she crossed to the window and stood looking out through the darkness to where the mountains rose like purple rainclouds against die evening pallor of the sky.

“I wonder what ids like,” she said. “I wonder what it’s like at night to be up there alone in the mountains.”

CHAPTER V

THERE she stood for some minutes, holding the curtain back against the white line of her bare arm, not an outline of her face visible to him as she gazed out to that land of the mountains over which hung the silver sickle of an early moon.

“Would you call a man queer,” she asked suddenly and turned round into the room, letting the curtains fall together behind her—“would you call a man queer who preferred the singing of birds to the voices of die greatest singers, who would sooner watch clouds gathering over the hills, and lapwings hovering over the fields, than the motions of people going about the world, who would sooner listen to the babbling of a stream than the talk of human beings—would you call him queer?”

She was so full of unexpected moods for Father Nolan that night that he relinquished all hope of understanding her.

“Is there such a man?” said he, at haphazard in order to gain time.

“I’ve known a man like that,” she replied. “Would you say he was queer?”

“Well—I’d sooner hear frogs croaking than I’d listen to a fella with a voice like Jamesy Power; and I’d sooner see an old cow going home to be milked than I’d watch Molly Heggarty walking the road to Mass of a Sunday. I don’t know would I say he was queer, if he’d as good a reason for doing it as that.”

“I don’t know what his reason was,” said she. “He just cut himself off from the world and there was something in his eyes that defied you—a sort of mental advantage, a kind of spiritual supremacy, that dared you to assail it.”

She had come back into the room, back to the extravagance of a fire lit in Spring. And there she sat, staring into the glowing embers of it, with that look in her eyes women so often indulge in—a look when they fondle a memory with little contemplative smiles to make you jealous of it. It was inevitable that question of his which followed. She prompted —indeed she asked for it.

“I suppose that was why ye did assail it?” said he.

She could not quite trust her eyes to meet the glance of his, for in that moment he had revealed her to herself. She was smiling and hiding her smile. He imagined it to be of the past, but what he had said was true of her in the days that lay before her. Until that instant she had not fully realized how surely the eyes of Anthony Sorel had defied her; had not realized how surely, too, the spirit of Romance had stirred in her to answer that defiance.

“Am I right?” he asked presently, when her head was still turned away from him and she had given no answer to his question.

Then, with an effort, she could look at him, forcing that expression of far memory into her eyes, simulating that note in the voice which speaks of what is long distant—a faintly refreshed memory.

“I must be loved,” she answered. “Don’t you know that? You don’t blame me—do you?”

Here, if he but knew it, she was seeking his approval, winning his consent for the thing her mind already was deliberating upon. With that subtle logic of women, she could deceive herself that the issue was the same whether it were of a matter that was past or of an intention yet to come. Forgiveness for the thing done, she argued, was approval of the thing in contemplation; yet she knew well enough that the first was much easier to obtain.

Deceived by now by the intricacies of her mood, the parish priest little knew how he was contributing to the decision her mind had set itself upon. Shrewdly suspicious though he was, he was no match for her cunning here. He did not blame her, he said, but remembering the hopeless passion of the man whose name he had just mentioned, all his sympathies went out to this other victim of her fascination.

“An’ I suppose ye robbed the pore fella of his mental advantage,” said he. “Ye didn’t leave a rag of that spiritual supremacy to his back?”

He thought of his own ideals, the illusions he cherished, the vows he had taken, and a bitter regret for the remorse that man must have suffered, swept like a hot wind across his mind. Almost he felt his anger rise against her, and swiftly enough she saw that in his eyes.

“You don’t like me,” she said at once and felt a martyr to his anger because, she told herself, the thing had never been.

“I’m not saying that,” said he.

“No—but I know that’s what you think. Yet after all why should a man be like that? It’s not natural, is it? He wasn’t meant for it. It’s all right for a priest.”

He looked at her seriously, knowing that here she was saying things which should be spoken of in the confessional, yet finding himself, as often he had done before, giving her the absolution of his sympathy for sins she had never committed.

“Ye make the great mistake,” he said at last, “the way ye think that celibacy is a matter of the body and not of the mind at all. Is it impossible for ye to conceive of a man, without his vows to die church being taken, who needs to lift his mind above the things ye set such a pass on? Love’s a great thing, I’m not saying it’s not, mind ye; and a good many people would be the better for knowing what it was. But can’t ye imagine a man making that ideal of it, the way he’d sooner see the end of himself than bring it down to earth?”

“Well?” said she and in that one word conveyed a thousand things. For suddenly her mind had leaped to the wonder and beauty of such a love as that; suddenly she had caught sight of the possibility of such a love for her in that young man she had met in the mountains; suddenly she had realized that tor such a love, she could find the answer to all her needs of life. And realizing it, in that one word, she had swiftly conveyed to him that this was what had happened in the past, because of her sure anticipation of it in the days to come.

As readily he was caught by the suggestion of that delicate inflexion in her voice.

“Is that what happened?” said he.

She nodded her head.

“Well, then,” he continued, “ye know what the best of love can be like in a man and ye may go the whole length of yeer life and ye’ll never find it again. Did he never say a word of it to ye?”

“No—not a word.”

And now to his questioning, with all the eager fancy of her imagination, she was presaging her own Romance with Anthony Sorel as she conceived it well might be.

“I don’t know then,” said Father Nolan presently, “that ye do yeerself justice when ye admit that ye robbed the man of his mental advantage. It seems to me that he must have got away with it safe and sound and every rag of spiritual supremacy whole on his back, though, mind ye, there’s one thing I can’t understand.”

“What’s that?”

He set his eyes with all their shrewdness straight to hers.

“I can understand,” said he, “how ye knew he . was in love with ye—shure a woman sees that with her two eyes shut—but will ye tell me how it was ye let the pore fella go an’ he not breathing a word of it to satisfy the mere human vanity of ye? Can ye tell me that?”

She could meet his eyes. In die determination of what she meant her Romance with Anthony Sorel should be, she could resist the full scrutiny of his glance. Almost the swift flame of indignation was there in her face as the fine whip of his assumption fell across her conscience.

“I shouldn’t rob a church,” said she and threw her head back to face his eyes. “Don’t you know that about me?”

“I do indeed,” said he. “Ye’d never rob a church, I know that; but ye’d make love to the priest inside of it.”

There was one instant when her anger might have overwhelmed him; when there might have been no more dinners at the big house for him for many a week to come. He knew that. His eyes twinkled with the danger of it, knowing, as he did, that you must not speak truth to a woman. But he had taken his chance, well aware of the woman he dealt with. That was only one instant, for the next her eyes were full of laughter. He was the only man who could have dared to give her truth like that. He was the only man who could have known it.

The laughter in her eyes came tumbling to her lips. There were so many things he did not know, that in that moment she could decide how little it mattered that he knew so much.

“Oh—you’re a dear thing,” she said between her laughter. “I wouldn’t let another man in the world know so much about me.” And so persuaded him to the belief he had all there was to know.

“Well—an’ all that,” said he, “doesn’t tell me why ye let the fella go.”

“He hasn’t gone,” said she.

“Not gone?”

“No—he’s in love with me still—he’ll always be in love with me.”

For this was how she saw the devotion of Anthony Sorel, lasting her life through; a great and imperishable passion she could feed her soul upon when the years had long taken the beauty from her eyes.

“An’ don’t ye want him ever to speak of it?” he asked.

Her eyes looked wistful. It was all so new to her, this sudden fancy of Romance.

“I don’t know,” she said speculatively—“I don’t know. Sometimes I believe I don’t—sometimes I believe I do.”

“Are ye going to marry him?” he whispered.

She took alarm at that.

“Oh—I don’t believe I shall ever marry!” she exclaimed. “That ’ud spoil it all.”

“Well, then, don’t let him speak,” said he, “an’ he’ll probably fall humanly in love with some good-natured creature, the way he’ll cherish an ideal for the rest of his days.”

“But I don’t want him to fall in love with any body else,” she retorted quickly. “I suppose that’s wrong of me—is it? Say it isn’t wrong.”

For a long moment he looked at her.

“Ye can’t hold the world in yeer hand and have it at yeer feet,” said he, and then he went into the hall for his old silk hat. - She followed, watching him as he thrust it on his head.

“You haven’t said it wasn’t wrong,” she said as he moved to the door.

“D’ye want me to?”

“Yes.”

“Well—I suppose if I said it was wrong, I should be finding fault with one of the laws of Nature.” “And you don’t do that—do you?”

“I do not.”

“Oh—I’m so glad.”

She said it again, as she closed the door behind him. For this was her confession and here was his approval. It is true he knew nothing of that office of confessor which had been forced upon him. But then so she had determined it and, that night, lay her head down on her pillow with a conscience warm in the thought that she had told him everything there was as yet to tell. Her eyes closed quite peacefully as she went to sleep. Romance was before her. There is not much more a woman asks for amongst the glittering prospects of life.

CHAPTER VI

IT was the morning of May Eve when next Anna Quartermaine passed by Feagarrid on her way up into die mountains. The sun was a burning light through the mist as she rose above the valley, following the rough cart-wheel tracks across the moors. Now again, as always when she walked the countryside alone, she unpinned the hat from her head and shook the hair loose upon her forehead. This was freedom and the sense of it through every pulse. In moments the humming below her breath became the uttered song in her voice, then fell to the muted note once more.

There is fearlessness and there is joy in the heart of a woman when she sets out in pursuit of Romance. Everything is to be gained and not a little to lose, wherefore her heart beats high as in one who comes upon the hour of his fateful venture.

From that evening of her confession to Father Nolan, her mind was set upon meeting the young man again in the mountains. Another month of the Spring there was and a whole Summer yet before her when, in the uneventful course of life, she would have spent her days in her garden or walking the moors in a happy freedom, demanding the joy of it in all she did.

This indeed in her earlier youth had been all that she had asked of life. Abroad, where others were content with the exotic pleasures of continental existence, she had found no joy but in the wild silences of untrodden ways, wandering alone by herself every day, returning tired at evening with ten and twenty miles on foot to the credit of her strength and endurance. In Monte Carlo where she often went, in Biarritz too, it was never for the so-called holiday spent at the Casino, or on the Plage, wearing frocks to bestir the envy in others. So she might have occupied herself had she chosen; but it was die passes in the mountains behind Monte Carlo to Ezfi and La Turbie and in Biarritz into the heart of the Pyrenees where she walked and walked alone.

They had their gossip and their stories about this beautiful Englishwoman who at evening would be seen returning across the Plage in a short tweed skirt and heavy boots all whitened with the dust of her travels. She had her lover, they said, and hid him in the mountains. They never would have believed she only found the joy of life in the mountain wind-flowers, the warm valleys and the sloping forests of the olive trees.

Men had loved her. That she admitted and never forgot to remind Father Nolan of it. But it had been in her solitude with Nature, she alone had found the deepest meanings in life. Many were the times she had seated herself on some lofty ledge of the hills, beside some purring stream, in the heart of some sunlit valley and, burying her face in her hands, had let the tears gather slowly in her eyes because she had never found such understanding in human beings as offered itself there on every side of her.

But now, latterly, as if with the growth of her character, had come the need of and the belief in human understanding. The utmost of it, certainly, she had found in Father Nolan. He, greatly indeed, yet unconsciously to both of them, had been the cause of the change in her. However, as yet, she had sought for it in others and in vain. Many men truly there were, giving her devotion, whole-heartedly, faithfully and with all the full ardor of the love she stirred in them. Nevertheless and always willingly receiving it, it still seemed to her it was not the thing she asked. For however it might be that these relationships began, they always culminated in one inevitable expression. So well did she know the inception of that passion ultimate in their minds, and so surely did it terminate the higher hopes that had been raised in hers.

Sometimes there were men in whom the devotion that she sought was not thus expressed in the terms she feared. These clung in her memory, cherished recollections she would not part with, as when a man in the sentimentality of his nature keeps under lock and key a crumpled rose, a piece of faded ribbon.

Had she stopped to analyze them, she might have realized how the want of opportunity had made them what they were. But quite unconscious of that, they remained memories of those possibilities of Romance which a woman takes into die imagination of her heart—a man too for that matter—because they had never attained the full course of their expression.

These indeed are the strange encounters in life that linger while others, even more definite, are lost in the bewildering flux of time. Such an adventure was one, constant in its recurrence to her mind. She was traveling to the South on the Cote d’Azur Express. In her carriage were three women whose conversation was not slow to find its way to the edges of her nerves. Annoyed at last beyond endurance by their empty chatter, she had left the compartment and wandered down the corridor. None of the carriages were empty. Her own sex was everywhere in occupation of some corner and women were not wildly to her liking at any time.

There was a smoking compartment, however, having but one occupant—a man buried in his paper, chewing the cud of contentment in a well-worn pipe. Here were all die signs of peace. She had pulled aside the door and, as was customary in her with men, had had no hesitation in making an immediate acquaintance.

“Shall I be disturbing you if I come in here?” she had asked, at which die pipe had been taken out of his mouth, the paper flattened upon his knee, all with an alacrity she expected of men, which moreover she was always ready to repay.

They had talked of a thousand things, all strange and interesting to her because revealing a new nature. And what was more, there was admiration adding fresh light in his eyes each moment as they sped onwards to the South. This was the sun to her. She breathed the joy of life in the warmth of it. There was so much he could have spoken had he dared; so much that circumstance demanded he should leave unsaid. By the time they reached Lyons, he was saying them all with his eyes.

And here it was, he had told her, that their journeys parted. Even she had not hid her regret at that.

“Think of the blaze of sun there will be in the South,” she said when he helped her out on to the windy platform as they went for cups of hot coffee.

That was her way of showing her regret, by making him regret their parting all the more.

For a moment as she sipped her hot coffee in the drafty restaurant—a moment of her sudden impulse —he left her. Five minutes he might have been gone—no more—but a long time, she thought, for one who wished to convey he was sorry to see the last of her. She was laying her cup down when he returned and on the platform the guards were crying, “En voiturel En voiturel”

She had hurried back to her compartment, but before she reached the carriage, he stopped and held out his hand.

“Bon voyage,” he said, “et tout le soleil que vous meritez”

“Not even seeing me into my carriage?” she asked —frankly disappointed now.

He took her to the steps of the corridor, then, lifting his hat, he turned and hurried away, never looking round, though she stood there upon the steps to give him every opportunity.

When she reached the empty smoking compartment there was the seat she had occupied heaped with a pyramid of red roses and on the top of it a scrap of paper. Something was written upon it. She had picked it up and read the words:

Thank God I am not coming to the South.

There was a proof of the impulse it had been. He had not even stopped to consider the wrong construction being put upon what he wrote. There had been but one meaning in his mind. She knew what it was. While the train was speeding through the little station of Tarascon, she was still sorting out the roses from the forest upon the seat.

This was a memory she cherished. Had he ever said more than those clumsy words, hastily written on that slip of paper, it had been a thing she might so easily have forgotten.

Father Nolan had been the parish priest in Ballysaggartmore some two or three years before that had happened. She had told him all about it, half lightly, half with those tender little tricks of recollection as when she spoke of all the men who had loved her. And this incident had been but one, marking the inception of that change in her nature.

Now, loving the untrodden ways of the world just as well as ever, she had come to find understanding also in human creatures that beat a heart with hers. And so it was there had risen in her mind this welcome expectancy of Romance, changing the whole prospect of the idle months that lay before her.

For the first hour, in the sheer joy of that Springtime of the year, she almost forgot the mission upon which she was bent. But as the still slopes of the mountains rose above her and the green emerald of that valley of the Araglin lay below, her heart began a livelier pulse. The blood came quickly and as quickly went in sudden flushes upon her cheeks.

Supposing he were not to be found? Was she to count the day and all those miles that lay behind her as wasted—just thrown away, dead empty things, from the lap of time? A few years before that would never have been; but now, as the thought reached her, she was conscious of apprehension and the prospect of her chagrin if it should be so.

The table rock as she came upon the sight of it was no longer occupied. No one was to be seen. Here and there a stray sheep grazed on the falling slopes. The clouds over the Galtee mountains were the only moving things that met her eyes. In countless broken shapes, like the sails of a fishing fleet, they rode out into the immeasurable blue from their hidden harbor of the hills.

A wide world she found it was in which to search for one human being. Great though the distances of vision might be, there was many a hidden pass, many a rent and turn in the rolling sweep of the hills where the eye could be cheated in its pursuit. She sat down on a bowlder that had come to rest, half embedded in a mound of earth. Now she realized how, without the generosity of chance, it were almost a futile hope to think of meeting him.

Yet there she remained for an hour and more, taking in with her eyes that broad prospect of the hills she supposed he fed his mind upon. There were the lapwings, tumbling and turning in their seemingly senseless flight above the green fields of the valley. Not more than a few yards from her a lark rose up, scattering the notes of its song as it lifted into the air. Stone-chats were chirping in their sudden invisible flights from one rock to another. Now and again a bee with muted thunder would rush by her ears. A stoat crept out of the brush of the heather on to the little beaten path. He lifted his sharp nose suspiciously and sniffed the air. Though she never stirred, she could see how well aware of her he was. Every movement of his sinuous body as he crept away was apprehensive and alert.

That short hour brought to her mind the knowledge that there is no real solitude in the world; it showed her too the utter peacefulness with which his mind must live. And then, while she was still sitting there, her eyes picked out the figure of a man climbing slowly up the path from the valley by which she had come.

Whatever the first impression may have been, stirring her blood to a sudden motion, she soon realized that it was not the figure of him for whom she had been seeking. It was an elderly man— one, living in a cottage, no doubt, in the neighborhood of those hills. As soon as she realized by his apparent direction, he must pass her way, she sat there waiting, her mind already determined upon what she would do.

In time he turned a corner of the path, when at once his little wrinkled eyes took sight of her. She thought again of the stoat she had seen as she watched him approaching. There was the same sharp suspicious air about him as he came slowly to where she sat. When he was but a few paces oil, she spoke.

“There’s a man living up here alone in the mountains,” she said. “Could you tell me where his cottage is?”

“There’s more than one man livin’ alone in the windy comers of these hills,” said he, stopping and resting on his stick as he peered at her. “Shure don’t I live meself over there in that little cabin below Crow Hill where ye can see the shmoke twistin’ up out of it now?”

She smiled, telling him he was not the man she meant “He’s younger than you,” she added.

She felt he knew well enough of whom she was speaking and only with the cunning of a child was assuming ignorance in order to discover something about herself. She had not been born, nor had she lived, amongst these people without knowing something about them.

“An’ is it yeerself has come all the ways from Lismore to see him?” he asked.

“I might have come from Lismore,” she replied and smiled again. “But telling you where I come from won’t help me to find out what I want to know. He told me that his cabin was on Knockshunahallion—that’s Knockshunahallion, isn’t it?”

She pointed to the highest peak in the range which, even on so clear a day as that, caught the fleece of the little clouds as they drifted by.

“Oh—shure ’tis him that calls himself Anthony Sorel,” said he, finding further evasion impossible. “Isn’t that his right name?”

“It is, of course. Wasn’t it the name he wrote on Michael Quinn’s piece of paper and they cornin’ to a wordy agreement about the cottage the way ye’d think Michael was selling him a king’s palace in four walls?”

“How far is it from here?”

“ ’Twould step about a mile.”

“Do you think I should be likely to find him there?”

He pushed back his hat and scratched his head. “Well—” said he—“I saw him walkin’ the road into Lismore last Tuesda’ an’ would he be back by now, I-dunno. ’Tis three days he’d be away every month, like a thing come and gone out of the mist.”

She felt that Fate was preparing her for disappointment, yet even so, curiosity was still to be fed. Having come so far, at least she wanted to see where he lived. Her companion was going that way and undertook to show her.

For some little way, they walked then in silence; she on the trodden path, he through the heather at her side.

“ ’Tisn’t often we see the fine gentry from Lismore in these lonesome parts,” he said presently.

“I suppose not,” she replied.

“Not unless they be gentlemen and they wid their guns and the dogs barkin’ across the face of the moors.”

“Does Anthony Sorel come up here for the shooting then?” she asked and found the name lingering on her lips as one who tries the taste of something in his mouth.

“Shure, he does not. Doesn’t he live here the year round.”

“What does he do then?”

He looked up at her as though that were a strange question to hear.

“What would a man be doin’ in the mountains,” he asked, “and he havin’ the songs of all the four winds to be tellin’ himself?”

“Is he a poet?”

“He is indeed, an’ ’tis women with the beauty in their face would be sittin’ through the long night to hear the music of the words that come out of him an’ he speakin’ the sorrows of Ireland an’ the shadows of death till the tears would bring salt to the drought of yeer lips.”

He stopped and pointed to a little whitewashed cabin that hung on the side of the hill above them.

“There he lives,” said he and then he added enigmatically: “ ’Tis a woman with the fall of night in her eyes will come one day knockin’ at his door an’ he stretchin’ out his arms the way she’ll find the world in them.”

This he said, standing there like a prophet on the slope of die land, and then he left her.

With a strange feeling in her heart, outgrowing curiosity, she climbed upwards to where the cabin stood. A wall of sullen rock rose up behind it. It was perched there upon the mountainside looking down through a gap into the far valley below, like a bird leaning against the wind.

The door was closed, the window shut and there she stood, her whole mind drawn in some mysterious attraction to the thought of the man who lived there. With what she knew herself, with what the old man had just told her, there was little to set the imagination upon. And yet never had she felt life to be so palpitating with possibility as then.

As if to set it in morion and before she could turn away, the door of the cabin had opened and there stood Anthony Sorel, cut clear against the blackness within.

CHAPTER VII

IT may have been in those moments as they stood looking at each other that Anthony Sorel saw some swift vision of the destiny before him; and Anna Quartermaine no less than he of her own. Certain it was a long passage of time at such a juncture before he spoke. And then, when his voice came from him, it was as one who speaks, thinking he sees the spirit rather than the substance. What with confusion and astonishment, die was as much disconcerted as he. [1]

“What do you want?” he said at last, just as if she were a ghost that had come to trouble him. She looked up at his eyes and answered in the same uncertain voice.

“I don’t want anything,” she said and could not fasten her mind upon the actual fact of her being there or why she had come, but was obsessed only by the absorbing strangeness of him and of his life. He had told her that he lived alone there in the mountains, yet only now, as he came out of the door of his cabin, had she realized how much alone and how absolutely aloof he was.

“Why do you come here then?” he continued. Without any harshness in his voice, the question yet had some odor of reproof. She felt somehow powerless to resent it, however, as if a priest had accused her of trespass in the sacred and secluded cloisters of a church. What was more, as if to a priest, she found herself answering the simple truth.

“I wanted to see where you lived,” said she. “Why?”

“I was curious, I suppose.”

He threw wide open the door he had half closed behind him and the gesture, simple and undramatic as it was, had the fullness of power to her. She could not have misunderstood it; she could have needed of it no other explanation. Without a word she accepted the invitation and walked into the cabin.

Had she expected much, little was there to fulfill her expectations. But she was not conscious of having expected anything. His personality was there, making all that atmosphere about her. The simplicity of everything, the plain bed, in which old Heggarty had died, with its patchwork quilt covering the bedclothes, the simple furniture he had bought in Fermoy, the Russian crucifix in the chimney corner, it was all no less wonderful to her than if the room had been as the imagination of Shauneen Troy had seen it. It was the man and his life that colored everything she saw. The chairs upon which he sat, the bed on which he slept, the table at which he ate his meals, associated themselves in her mind with the strange loneliness of his being. She stared at them all and round about the room as though everything, valueless in itself, were of absorbing and peculiar interest.

When she brought her eyes back, looking to him, he took her gaze to be inquiry and said, “This is all—” as though he supposed she had expected more.

It was not easy after that to break into usual conversation such as would have been possible under more ordinary circumstances. She felt she ought to apologize for her curiosity; had come so far to it as the framing of the words upon her lips but could not utter them. The formality of that apology seemed ludicrous as she contemplated it. So, still she stood, looking first at him, then at the room about her, in that way as when a child is discovered in its guilt and awaits the proclamation of punishment. This was the strange power of his presence beside her. All that she thought of seemed folly to say.

When he broke the spell of that and spoke, it was only to add another, the mysterious quality of his voice. She had been aware of it before, when they had spoken on the mountainside. Now, within those four walls, it was intensified. She found herself listening for the sound of it as she might be listening to music, sensitive to the note of its quiet restraint.

“Now you have seen all that is to be seen,” he said.

The suggestion of resentment in that, not in his voice, but in the mere words as he used them, urged her at least to dispel it. He was dismissing her and, with so little accomplished, she refused to be dismissed.

“But I understand nothing at all that might be understood,” she replied, half concealing the audacity of that in the gentleness of her voice, softening it in the light of her smile.

He succumbed to neither. There had been no resentment in him. Of such a humor as this, his conscience was wholly free. In those two years of his solitude, his mind had found that quietness which is not easily stirred to impulsive reaction. He scarcely even asked himself, beyond those questions he had put to her, why she had come so far into the mountains and with this paltry pretext, just to see where he lived. He did not even realize how deliberately beautiful she was, but stood there in those first moments, merely wondering when she would go.

She understood nothing, she said. Well—what was there to understand? He asked her that. What was there to understand?

“Why you live here,” she answered and reminded him how he had invited her curiosity when they had first met She recalled the words to his mind. “You asked me to think over it,” she said—“whether you were queer or not.”

“Well?” said he.

“Well—I have thought about it and perhaps you’re not—queer—but all the same I don’t understand. I suppose it’s because you’re a poet and want to be close to Nature—but why do you ignore human nature? Why do you cut yourself so absolutely adrift from the world?”

“Who told you I wrote poetry?” he asked.

“An old man coming across the mountains.” “Old Malachi.”

“He didn’t tell me his name.”

“It was Malachi,” he repeated. “But he’s more of a poet than I shall ever be. I’ve tried to take down some of the things he says to me, the tales he tells of the faeries and all the strange things that happen in these mountains and when I come to read them over afterwards, I know that they are more instinct with the sense of poetry than anything I shall ever do—unless I succeed.”

She was quick to know that in his hesitation he had spoken of something that was secret to himself. If he succeeded—that was the first confession he had made. At once she asked him what he meant by that but his answer only confused her the more.

He told her indefinitely of desires to overcome the despotism of life, as one who rises against established government and flings his soul into the tumult of revolution. Nothing that she called humanity, the humanity she had accustomed herself to deal with, was to be found in him as yet. He spoke of motives that only bewildered her; but notwithstanding, as he made them glowing with words, she felt behind it all some mystery of meaning full of an absorbing interest it was impossible to deny.

This effect it had upon her, that now she was determined to understand it all. The very sensitiveness of him enticed her. The element of mystery in him urged her on. She put forth all those powers of sympathy of which the will of a woman is capable; at one moment a child eager to learn and again maternal in her readiness to hear.

So long had he lived apart from the ways of women, that Anthony Sorel drifted into confession as one who succumbs to the peaceful narcotic of a drug. When she asked if she might hear his poetry, he rose, like a child, and went to a drawer of the dresser that stood against the wall, bringing out a sheaf of papers covered with that same illegible writing they had deciphered with such difficulty on Michael Quinn’s agreement.

One after another he read them to her until the sound of his voice and the beauty of the words became as one in her ears and had with them all the charm of music that nurses and thrills the emotions from sleep to wakefulness. She knew she was fast falling under the spell of romantic enchantment. Here it truly seemed was a man who could be all things. In the spirit of him was all the ring and adventurousness of life. In a fierce tumult, she felt fie could ride out into the hour of battle, yet turn to such gentleness as she had never experienced before.

With a passive willingness, she let the spell of it surround and envelop her until, as she listened, there was one poem that he read, to which the swift heat of a jealous apprehension brought sudden reaction.

“I gave my spirit to a bird in flight,
And watched it soaring ever out of sight;
Till, like a fountain’s spray in summer heat,
All palpitating fell its singing at my feet.

“There in the arch of the abundant sky,
Where other spirits are forever passing by,
My soul leaned out into the amazing blue,
And found the imperishable soul of you.”

She let him read on, but with a bitter conviction that the enchantment was ended. The mind that had conceived those words had fixed a gulf between itself and her. There was some woman—how could she ever have doubted it?—laying her claim to him. A glance at his face, sensitive and emotional, however stern and ascetic it might be too, had promised enough in their first meeting to convince her of the passionate and relentless lover he could be. With quick intuitive calculations, she surmised the romantic purpose of his solitude, counting herself before a far more formidable rival than this celibate asceticism with which he had dammed the stream of Nature in his being.

Nevertheless, she let him finish before she spoke, saying to herself, as she had said to Father Nolan, that it was not she who would rob a church, yet thinking bitterly no less of the woman who gave him sanctuary.

“I gave my spirit to a bird in flight;
Its wings are caught now in a passion’s plight—
And gone are all the truths I ever knew,
And gone is the immeasurable soul of you.”

She looked up, as he looked up, resetting in that single instant all her surest calculations; seeing him bereft of sanctuary, no longer the church she would not rob, but now, as Father Nolan had said, the priest whose love her nature must command.

“Have you lost her long?” she asked gently.

“Lost whom?”

He put the paper down and stared with questioning eyes—almost as children look.

“The woman you loved?”

One by one he picked the papers up and took them to the drawer of the dresser and stood there, arranging them as he put them back, with that hesitation of movement which shows the deep preoccupation of the mind.

But she would not be denied. If he had chosen silence to avoid her question, it availed him nothing.

“Is that why you live here?” she asked and with that note of sympathy which soothes, invites, caresses. There was no need to bring it to her voice. There it was. She felt sympathy drawn from her to the silent figure of him struggling, as she knew he was, against himself, to keep the virtue and the vigor of his solitude.

“Didn’t you come here, up into the mountains,” sue persisted gently, “because you wanted to forget her? Wasn’t that it?”

“And gone were all the truths I ever knew,

And gone was the imperishable soul of you.”

She could quote the lines without hesitation or mistake. The sound of them in her voice brought him round to her. Nothing had made him realize her sympathy so well as that.

“There was no woman,” he said, “no woman, like that.”

“Why did you write it then?”

“Because I believed that of myself at the time. I believed I should one day love like that—and lose like that You didn’t understand me a little while ago when I talked of the despotism of life. That’s why I’m here. I’m trying to forget all women, not one. When I first came here I could not have given my spirit to a bird in flight. My nature is emotional. Perhaps you know that already. But emotions like everyone else’s, that bring lead into my feet and make a servant of me, not a free man. Last time you saw me, I was watching the larks rise out of the heather—well, one of these days, I shall get freedom like that. It’s only up there where the lark rises and the clouds ride in the sky that you see things beautiful for the beauty they have. Here, a thing is only beautiful for the emotions it brings you.”

He stopped suddenly with a gesture of despair as though he knew he was speaking the everlasting riddle of the universe. With that same gesture of despair, he closed the drawer of the dresser and strode to the door, standing there and looking across the mountains where the little spring freshets were falling white like strands of silver hair between the bowlders.

She let him keep his silence now, knowing that he must speak again in such time as the course of his thoughts had run. But when he turned, she was unprepared for what he had to say.

“Why did you come up here again,” he asked, “reminding me of the things I had forgotten?”

“What things?”

“This—this life here—the solitude, the loneliness of it.”

Suddenly he left the door and came back into the room, moved by restlessness now. He found a seat in the dim light of the chimney corner and sat there staring into the fire. As suddenly then, breaking his silence as, on an instant’s determination, a man might break a sword across his knees, he launched forth into an endless confession of his innermost self—the speech of a man in whom the pent-up silences have broken down, flooding in a torrent of words no resistance of the spirit can stem.

He told her of his life in London and abroad, before he came to Knockshunahallion—the confession of a child, unsparing and relentless in its cruel honesty.

By slow degrees she saw the thing he had been, a creature driven by emotions, yet finding none to feed his soul upon, struggling in the drifting sands with eyes blinded as he turned them ever to the unapproachable wonder of the sun. It was the admission of a life no man she had ever known would ask blame for, indeed a greater spirit than she had ever met, battling against the unaccountable odds.

It was only when he came to the setting forth of his philosophy that she lost sight in the swift and upward flights he took. Here he came into the regions of his mysticism, an atmosphere too rarefied for her to breathe. Now he was talking of the faeries as a man speaks with familiarity of those about him in a strange land. She could see visions in his eyes as the words came tumbling from his lips. Indeed it was of visions he talked as well, but not as one versed in occult practices, burning strange incense to numb the senses, seeking for signs, self-hypnotized, in a crystal globe. He spoke gently, almost with awe, as one who has seen and heard and can never forget. This was where she lost knowledge of him. This was where she made the fatal error in her soul.

Why, she asked herself, as she listened, why does he wish that I had never come again? She could not but believe that this outpouring of his mind, bringing echoes of life into those pent-up silences, was healthful, as they would tell her was confession for the soul.

For now, as with a lark in flight, soaring into the blue zenith of the heavens, her mental vision could not keep sight of him. He had left her standing there on earth, listening only to the words he said with but the faintest comprehension of their meaning.

He had chosen this life of a recluse to gain a .calm, a vigor and a strength of his emotional imagination. There, living as a solitary in those mountains, he was striving to achieve the conquest of mind over the sensations of his body.

The ambition baffled her. She could not follow its ultimate gain. There was Nature in her, as in all women; she saw no other law. This was the madness in him he had bid her seek for when he had left her that first day of their meeting. Now she had found it, but instead of repelling, it attracted her. There was a fascination in all the wild mysticism he talked. This celibate asceticism he upheld, little as she understood it, set her heart beating in a tumult of Romance.

Here was the error that she made, fatal for him; the fatal error ultimately for herself.

With her knowledge of men, how could she believe him when he told her that it was in the soul of all men to seek this pathway to the mysterious stars?

“The celibacy of men is a voluntary celibacy,” he said to give her proof of it; but with the men she had known and the ultimate expressions of their emotions, she could but smile reminiscently at that, forgetting her Father Nolan in his shelter of the church.

“This is a phase,” she told herself as she listened, clinging to Nature, unshaken in her belief of it. But it was a phase she had never met in a man before. At least there was no pretense in it. For two years he had been alone there in those mountains —a Buddha, fasting in the wilderness. But how could she believe him when he told her that all men, before the despotism of life had made them slaves, would so struggle, so endure?

“Why don’t they then?” she asked.

“Life seizes a man too swiftly,” said he. “Before the mind is awake in him the body has tasted the easy joys of a pleasant servitude. How many think in time? Bring children up in the world of faeries these poor people live in,” he declared, “and watch the youth of a man before he touches life. His ideals are like swallows flying swift and high. Never the earth for them.”

He would say no more; indeed he had no powers of speech in argument. She would have driven him to silence had she asked him more.

“There are meanings the mind has no concern with,” he said. “Facts have meanings and facts die.”

He could only speak to her sympathetic listening, and then with halting phrases, of the visions his soul encountered. When she would reason with him this or that, it was like bringing a bird to earth with a broken wing. He would turn and look at her in helpless silence.

“But why—” she said at last—“why did you wish I had not found my way here again? What harm have I done? Haven’t I been sympathetic? Do you deny yourself even that?”

He stretched out his hands over the fire as if in that there were more of human understanding.

“Who are you?” he said suddenly.

She told him, but he listened as though it made no matter who she was. Almost before she had finished, he was speaking quickly again, telling her that she was the despotism of life, reminding him of his loneliness, reviving in him the hunger for sympathetic companionship which in those two years he had almost taught his mind to renounce.

“But are you always going to renounce it?” she asked.

“Who knows what any man is always going to do?” said he. “Buddha lived the life of a hermit and found that truth was not to be learnt in lonely places; then he came out into the world. But it was in the lonely places he had first found the calm and vigor of his soul. Do you think I ever thought when I came alone here into the mountains to find the dominion of myself, that I should meet with you? Do you think I should have come if I had?”

“What difference do I make?” she whispered.

He stood up from his seat by the fire and walked again to the door, flinging it wide open, upper and lower half of it, so that the sunlight was cut in one square patch of gold upon the floor.

“Come out and walk,” he said, forcing his voice to quietness. “Let’s walk up there to where that buzzard is circling high above the peak. All thought runs to despotism in cramped spaces like this room. Come with me, high up above all this. Then you’ll understand.”

She went obediently to his side and by bis side walked up the untrodden paths until they stood where even the stone-chats would not follow and far below them the larks rose out of the heather soaring to reach them where they were.

CHAPTER VIII

TIMES without number she had been in the mountains of Europe, altitudes beside which, in comparison, this Knockshunahallion was a little hill, yet never did it seem to her she had been so high above (he world as then.

Clear as was the day, there were veiling clouds, thin scarfs of mist that passed beneath them, now hiding the far-off valleys, now revealing them in the glamour of the sun. The little cabins and the tiny farms were like scraps of white paper, the faindy distinguishable trail of life in a paper chase of the giants. From those heights she saw the world with new eyes and, however dimly, yet there in the faint consciousness of her mind came the suspicion of what he learnt in his solitude.

Far away beyond the valley and across the moors a thick cluster of trees marked the direction of Ballysaggartmore on that living map of green. She touched his arm and stretched out her hand, pointing, it seemed to her, across the continent, and said, “That’s where I live.”

His eyes went out to the line of light winding through the trees. This was the Blackwater, threading emeralds on a string of gold.

These were the first words which had been spoken since they had left his cabin. Then silence surrounded them again, a stillness that was a tangible thing, a quiet like the hush of children, waiting with minds on tiptoe for a story.

She stood beside him, conscious of the wish to put her arm in his, moved by some sense of gratitude for the world he showed her. Once her hand moved, tentative to do the thing that she desired, but remembrance of his wish that she had never come, the knowledge of the struggle that still was a tumult in his mind, dropped it again in generosity to her side.

“I must make him forget that I am here at all,” she told herself. By that means only, she knew she might find leave to come again. This was the first time in her life she had ever subdued the egotism of her personality. He was the first man who had wakened in her that instinct of passive subordination, the surest weapon Nature can give into a woman’s hands. So it was not she who would break the silence now. The wind played gently through her hair, a chill wind as it came across the shadows of the mountains which even the open sunshine could not wholly warm again. Still she did not speak.

She listened, as she knew he was listening, to the sounds of the world that rose so faintly to their ears. The song of a lark, the intermittent cry of the buzzard wheeling over their heads, the burring murmur of the mountain streams that tumbled like a shower of crystals, shining white into the valley’s lap, these were all mingled into a whispering song the depth of air had muted as it came to them. But it was more his listening she listened to than the sounds themselves.

Yet she too could feel now the dwindling paltriness of the common life in such an altitude as that; knew what he meant when he had told her how in the first few months of his solitude he had striven against the fear of loneliness and dreaded the anger of the mountain storms.

“Then,” he had said, “as the days went by and I had shaken oil the weight of life we carry on our shoulders, then I heard such music in the storms at night, as no orchestra of a thousand instruments could ever play.”

Standing there with him then, she could believe how that was true, yet thought with a clinging pleasure of the warm room in which at such times she hid herself, pulling the heavy curtains and shutting out the importunate agonies of the wind. That was what he would call the despotism of life. Slowly she was beginning to know that his was the higher truth, but came no nearer to departure from her own. For even then, in a sudden moment of emotional belief, she said,

“Up here, I think I could almost believe in faeries.”

And forgetting all the generous intentions of her mind but those few moments ago, she slipped her arm impulsively, warm and close in his. Only when she shivered did she remember what she had done, but once there and feeling the warmth of it, she could not bring herself to take it away. If that were the slavery of life, it was, as he had said, a pleasant servitude. High though his truth might be, she needed no loftier exaltation than that which she already had.

It may have been a thought for her, for though he shivered when her arm touched his, he did not move away.

“This is May Eve,” he said—“the night the faeries ride out and dance and play their music in all the nooks and crevices of these hills. Any stranger that knocks at a cottage door to-night, if they should unbolt the latch, will be faerie man or woman to, those within. They will shut the door against him or bid him enter according to the fear and the emotions in their hearts.”

Her own belief which was emotional became doubt again when she saw the deeper belief in him. So long had she regarded this belief in faeries to be a country superstition, declaring her faith in them only in moments of childish exhilaration, that when she came to the real faith such as his, all that exhilaration left her for the reasoned doubt again.

She looked up into his eyes, questioning with her own but still keeping hold upon his arm.

“Do you really mean to say,” she murmured, “that faeries do come to people’s doors; that there are people who actually see them, speak with them, give them shelter or turn them away? Surely isn’t it all a superstition? Isn’t it the unbalanced reason of a terrible ignorance that makes people see these things?”

He shook his head.

“Those are only words,” he answered her. “Ignorance, superstition, they are only words with relative meanings. You are ignorant of the ways of the world, but you may have great knowledge of the ways of God; you are ignorant of the meaning and beauties of music but none may know better than you what the curlew means when he cries through the mist across the lonely bogland. None better than you may hear the music in his mournful note. You are utterly ignorant of the emotions that fret and drive your soul, but none may know better than you the power of faeries in the solitary corners of the world. In a few hours when the evening falls I will bring you down into the valley and show you one who knows nothing of the fatal emotions that beset her but whose ears hear plainer than ours the sound of faerie music which is the very spirit of the Fate that hangs about her. Will you come?”

“Shall I be afraid?” she asked.

“Fear is worse than ignorance,” said he. “Will you come?”

She closed her fingers on his arm and bent her head.

CHAPTER IX

WHEN the sun was falling behind Kilworth, and as the dropping light of it cast those first, soft, long rays of the glowing gold of evening along the green banks of the Duag valley, Anthony Sorel brought her down the mountain side to Gorteeshall. Then the shadows were lengthening—lengthening into giant arms that stretched lingeringly over the breast of the earth before it fell asleep.

“I will show you an adventure where the faeries are concerned,” he had said and when below them the valley spread out its fields of green, bound with that twisting ribbon of the river Duag, he pointed to a white-washed cottage from which the blue smoke rose above the thatch in one straight column to the evening sky.

“There,” he said, touching her arm, so that she stood beside him—“there in that cottage lives a girl with more beauty in her face than they have ever seen in these mountains for many a day.”

She looked at him quickly.

“Do you think she’s beautiful?” she asked. Perhaps he did not see that look; certainly he never knew its meaning.

“I think her beautiful—yes,” he replied. “I think sometimes it is the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. Often I’ve stood watching her at the cross roads where she used to dance with the other girls and young men about. They know little of the grace of dancing, which after all is only a grace of the body not a grace of mind. It’s their minds have grace. But she had elegance of movement too.”

“You were attracted to her?” she said, half in question, half in the way women make statements of those things that women know.

He took no notice of that and continued speaking. She could not be sure if it were that he had avoided answering or if it were simply that he had not heard.

“What came to her,” he went on, “happened about two weeks ago, over there at the spot where you see those roads cross like ropes tying the fields together. She says for some moments, as the light of the evening was dying she heard music other than that which the old man was playing for the dancing on his fiddle. Her feet got caught in it, she said, so that she could not keep time with the fiddler’s music. Indeed the young man who was dancing with her at the time assured me that she was all out of step—not a fault she could ever be accused of. Then, as the darkness came on, she saw a light in the field that moved in and out amongst the cows that were grazing there. It was not curiosity she felt, she told me, but, so well as I can gather, an irresistible impulse that induced her to follow it. She left the dancing and went into the field and the light danced before her, always some few yards away. It must have dazzled her eyes and so preoccupied her that she could not see where she was going, for she fell down a gravel pit that had been dug a few days before for some purpose or other and, falling, she broke her leg. At first, she said she felt no pain. She was only distressed because the light was no longer visible. But after a time, when she heard an end to the music at the cross roads, the pain became almost unbearable. She cried out and so it was they found her lying there. There she is now, in a bed in that cottage where her mother lives with her and when I’ve told you all about her, I’ll take you down there. You shall see her. You shall see the concerns of faeries.”

“Was it faerie music then? Was it a light of the faeries too?”

She asked now with the voice of one eager to believe. The way he spoke conquered her incredulity. There was a spell in the strange music of his voice; she felt it growing upon her as a hidden motive in a symphony steals into the consciousness of the mind.

“That is what they say,” he replied—“what they believe. Youth and beauty are ever in danger of being taken by the faeries and the old woman, her mother, so they tell, has speech with them. The people about here have no love of passing her cottage after dark. But listen to what happens now. Mary’s leg is so badly broken that the doctor from Clogheen has said that it must be amputated or she is sure to come by her death. He is not certain enough of his skill to guarantee that even this will save her life though he knows it is the only possible thing to do. But there is a spell upon Mary ever since she heard that music and saw that light. She declares she will not have her beauty spoilt. The doctor has tried to insist that the amputation must be made, whereupon Mary’s mother has decreed that she will prosecute him if the operation is not successful. This has frightened him. He has not the courage of his skill to persevere and there she lies on a bed of terrible suffering in that cottage, listening to the music she still hears and doomed to die, the doctor tells me. Nothing can possibly save her. That is how the faeries have concerned themselves with Mary Coyne.”

She stood there beside him on the slope of the mountain, looking now at the cottage with its column of dim blue smoke, now at his face, set across the far line of the valley, now at the cottage again.

It did not occur to her to ask him if he believed the story he had just told her, but, as they went on again down the hillside, she asked him, with that same note of tentative restraint in her voice, what he understood of it all.

“She has the emotions of her own beauty,” he said. “They are bringing her death. That is how these mountain people come near the truth. They have the power of vision to see the symbols of their own emotions. Her beauty is her own destruction. I have seen that in her eyes as she looked at me.”

In the blindness of her mind, she understood his answer, though none of it was dear to the consdous-ness of reason.

The music that Mary Coyne had heard in her ears, the dancing, luring light she had seen, these were symbols of her own fatal emotions. This was what Anna Quartermaine dimly divined he must mean, but could not have put it into words and so kept silence as she walked beside him. Whether he thought the light and the music were real things of faerie she could not have said. She could not have been assured that she did not believe them real herself.

The golden light of the evening had died through purple grays to darkness as they reached the cottage door. Anthony Sorel knocked upon the panel and, after a few minutes, the upper half was opened, when they could see an old woman, with short gray hair clipped close around her neck, looking like a halo about her pale face with its sharp and almost aristocratic features. It was not difficult to see that she had been beautiful once herself. But it was her eyes more than her beauty which, in that first moment, drew all the attention of Anna Quartermaine.

With a glance too swift almost to be seen, the old woman had recognized Anthony Sorel and then her gaze had fallen upon his companion. So Anna Quartermaine could fully see her eyes, the vivid penetration of them, but lit with no ordinary light of reason or curiosity. Indeed they seemed to be searching for thoughts and substances which were beyond the mind to comprehend. Could that look have been translated into words, to Anna Quartermaine it must have been some foreign tongue she could not understand.

Anthony Sorel bid her good evening. At the sound of his voice she withdrew the gaze of her eyes, opened the lower part of the door and made way for them to enter.

It was a cottage just as any other you will see in the south of Ireland. One further room, a bedroom, there was, beyond the kitchen into which they came. The door of it was open. There was the bed on which Mary Coyne lay dying. Anthony Sorel walked quietly into the room and stood beside her. Anna Quartermaine followed him. For an instant she had half turned, hesitating, but with a quick understanding, Mrs. Coyne had urged her, muttering she was welcome.

So she stood at the foot of the untidy bed, looking down at the face on the crumpled pillow. It was indeed, even in those moments, intensely beautiful, so beautiful that she did not even in her mind’s eye need to re-dress the disordered hair or think how much improvement she could make in it with the addition of faintest color to the cheeks. For as well as beauty there was in her eyes the strange and wild exhilaration of death, as if it were a lover about to take her for the first time into the passionate embrace of his arms. The look of expectancy was there and, shy in the anticipation of it, she almost held her breath.

Instinctively she looked at Anthony Sorel. His eyes were steady and emotionless as though he knew of the approach of death and heard its footsteps in the room beyond. She sought for the look of admiration she expected or for that agony which must be seen in his eyes as a man gazes upon beauty that he loves when it joins hands with death. But no such expressions were there. His face was calm. His eyes bent steadily on those of Mary Coyne and she looked up at him as though saying, “Am I not beautiful, even more beautiful so near to death?”

“Is the music still playing for you, Mary?” he asked presently.

“I heard it last night,” she said, “an’ it callin’ me through the window beyond, the way I’d be set-tin’ me foot to ut if the leg wasn’t broken on me.”

“What was it like?”

“Like the strings of a fiddle that would be made of woman’s hair an’ weren’t all the sorrows of the world in ut like the wind that scatters the thistledown and sobs under the warp of the old door?”

“Do you feel any better in yourself?” he asked her then.

She turned over with much pain upon her side and moaned softly as she did so.

“I do not,” said she, “an’ if death is to be cornin’ to me, wouldn’t it come swift in the night while I’d be hearin’ the music, the way I’d be havin’ all the beauty I had with me again an’ I not cramped here on the bed like an old hag lettin’ the last gasps out of her.”

He turned away from the bedside and motioning to Mrs. Coyne she followed him with Anna Quartermaine into the other room. When he had dosed the door of the bedroom, he returned and stood beside the fire.

“Mary will die,” said he to the old woman, “and ’twill be her beauty killed her.”

Mrs. Coyne wrung her hands but there were no tears in her eyes. She wrung her hands in a hard passion of grief.

“Haven’t they set their spell on her,” she cried, “and what could I be doing for the girl if they’ve put their minds on takin’ her!”

“Insist on the doctor doing his operation,” he replied quietly. “That is the only hope of saving her. Any day, any moment it may be too late. Come, come—we all know there are faeries and this is the work of faeries no doubt—but people say you have the power to deal with them. If she does lose her beauty and has to be walking the world with crutches to help her, isn’t that better than to be losing her?”

Anna Quartermaine listened but all her senses were now faint and subdued in her as though she breathed an atmosphere heavy with sleep. The sound of his voice was like a far note continuous in her ears, but it was with difficulty she could reason what he said. Did he know then, she asked herself, did he know there were faeries or was his speech only to humor the woman? She looked up at him standing there and it seemed to her as if the strength and calmness of his mind was stronger than all the common power of men. This was more than the mere adventure of Romance she had sought for, to pass the hours of Spring into the long days of Summer. Her heart was not beating quickly, but the heavy throb of it was loud like a hammer in her pulse.

Had there been a sign of his admiration for that dying girl within she would have known he was yet the same as other men. But no such sign had there been. He had spoken of her beauty; he had looked at it as though it were a flower he had found on the mountainside—a thing he would resist the plucking to wear for his own adornment. Even when Mrs. Coyne returned her answer to his urging, Anna Quartermaine kept her eyes set on Anthony Sorel’s face, hearing, only as if it were in the distance, what she said.

“Why would I be lettin’ the doctor use his knife to her,” she began. “Isn’t she a sick enough' one as it is? Shure, wouldn’t they take the leg away wid them to be doing tricks wid it there in Clogheen, the way they bought Tim Coughlan’s body for the hospital in Dublin an’ paid his woman two pounds for it an’ she drinkin’ every penny of it to drown the shame it brought her? Glory be to the Almighty God, wouldn’t I sooner see herself goin’ wid the faeries, than standin’ up on the last day wid one leg to her an’ she shamed of her beauty before God Himself!”

In this strain, slowly working upon her own unbridled emotions, it seemed she talked without ending and all the while Anna Quartermaine watched Anthony Sorel’s face. It was full of a sensitive mobility, and to all that the old woman said, the expression of his lips and eyes reflected her words as one plays upon some instrument his hand was born to.

Then gradually in the growing passion of her words, the note in the old woman’s voice became a note of frenzy. At the sound of it, but with no sense of fear, Anna Quartermaine turned to look at her. Saliva was gathered in a froth of bubbles at the corners of her wrinkled mouth, her eyes were flashing with the daring confidence of prophecy. They were fixed upon Anthony Sorel’s face as if with just the light in them she would burn out his soul.

It was not till then that a consciousness of fear took the mind of Anna Quartermaine. With a sudden movement, she caught Anthony Sorel’s hand and held it fast.

“Let us go,” she whispered—“please let us go.”

For swiftly it had come to her mind that the old woman was mad. It was no uncommon thing amongst those people with the loneliness of their lives and hers was not an unnatural dread of it.

“Let us go,” she whispered again and stood up beside him.

“You’ve nothing to fear,” he replied quietly and took a closer hold upon her hand. “Let her go on, she speaks with authority.”

“An’ wouldn’t I speak well with the gift of sight,” she cried, “an’ on this night when the hosts of them do be ridin’ out with their horses gallopin thunder over the heather! Wouldn’t I know ye well as ye sthand there, wouldn’t I know ye well to be eaten up with wisdom an’ still not be wise, to be ever watching with yeer quiet eyes an’ still be blind, to be listenin’ the way of a dog an’ he huntin’ an’ still be deaf? I would indeed! Is it that sort of wisdom ye’d be preachin’ to herself in there? Yirra, ’tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ to ye an’ ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are crossed an’ the night comes batterin’ with the wind across the mountains at yeer little door. Hear what I say, young man, before ye preach the cunnin’ ways of thim doctors to me, for isn’t there the speech of knowledge in me this night an’ wouldn’t I be walkin’ the hills with me two feet bare on me before I’d know the words again I’d be sayin’ to ye now?”

With a sudden movement and still in her frenzy, she turned her eyes on Anna Quartermaine who involuntarily clung the closer to Anthony Sorel’s side.

“Who are ye?” she asked. “Who are ye, cornin’ with yeer own beauty to spy out the face of herself beyond in the room on her little bed?”

Knowing it was the truth, Anna Quartermaine shuddered, fearing the things she still might say.

“I brought this lady,” Anthony Sorel replied. “She did not come of herself. I brought her. Your sight is failing you. Your moment is going. Get back to your daughter and do what I advise you or send for the priest if you need him.”

At that she beat her hands upon her head and stamped her foot upon the hard mud floor.

“The sight is not gone from me!” she cried. “Haven’t I vision now can see the cornin’ of the days, an’ the break of momin’ when death will be cornin’ to herself sthandin’ there an’ she dreamin’ the world away of a lover with his arms around the soft white breast of her. Let ye go out die both of ye an’ dare the faeries that do be dancin’ everywhere this night. ’Tis ye have wisdom an’ are still not wise —’tis ye look strainin’ with yeer eyes an’ cannot see.”

This was die last effort of her speech. As though a hand had been pressed against her lips she stopped suddenly in speaking; as though some hidden power had seized her, she dropped with her frenzy spent upon the floor.

Without a word Anthony Sorel lifted her in his arms and carried her to her bed in the other room. When he came back, Anna Quartermaine could see that his face was white. Indeed, she felt the bloodlessness in her own. Then he took her arm and led her to the door. They passed out into the darkness that the moon was faintly glimmering with light. He fastened the latch and so they turned up the mountainside again. For a long while he spoke no word and then he said,

“Mary Coyne will die this night.”

After that between them nothing else was said until he set her on the road to Ballysaggartmore.

CHAPTER X

IT was as he walked back across the moors and up the half-trodden pathways again into the mountains that Anthony Sorel knew some change had come upon him that day.

At first he was slow to realize what it was or how it had happened. Ideas moved strangely in his mind but he could not trace their passage, or know whence they had come. It was long he found the way back to his cabin and his eyes that had grown so accustomed to those gray lights before the moon had risen were now restless because everything seemed dark. The far edges of the hills cut sharp metallic lines against the purple sky; the snipe that rose with a quick cry and a rush of wings out of the bracken as he crossed the moor set the heart beating suddenly within him. It seemed a vast world, that black space into which it flung itself as it disappeared in search of another bed to sleep in undisturbed.

When he reached his cabin, he opened the door and went in, for long minutes standing there with the catch still in his hand looking at the chair Anna Quartermaine had occupied. There it remained, turned to the fire, just where she had sat and listened to the wandering story he had told her. With the long habits of solitude, his mind drifted with out direction in countless channels. Then his eyes were looking inwards, as when a man is caught between the worlds of belief and imagination.

At last, closing the door, with an abstracted care, he set the room to rights, yet still was restless, with no thought of sleep. The fire was burnt out to the dim glow behind white ashes. Another night he would have got to his bed, letting it die and be buried in its own cold embers; but now he sat beside the bellows-wheel and blew die ashes into a flame of more cheerful companionship. Even then there passed an hour by before he lay himself down with eyes turned to the wall, where the firelights danced until it seemed they were a ring of the children of faerie dancing around him, nearer and nearer until their little feet had closed his eyes.

In the morning the sun wakened him and the knowledge of that change was with him still. It was not that he was watching the movements of his mind, for the change seemed without him, rather than within. He looked around the room of his cabin and was conscious of the four walls that contained it. As though he were an onlooker from some more distant place, he stood aside and could see himself living there alone, from one day, from one night to another, through the seasons, through the years—always alone.

What had brought that change in him? He was too ignorant of himself to tell. It was not in his emotions, for the sensation all through his body, even to his mind, was as if he moved, saw, felt, all in a trance. Yet at moments his heart beat quickly as when he wondered to himself why Anna Quartermaine had come across the moors and up those mountain paths to see the place in which he lived.

He blamed himself for talking as he did; for letting his mind be so disturbed with thoughts of her. Yet continually he was knowing that through all he had said, she had made Mm feel the higher, intentions of his soul’s endeavor. As her face stood there in his memory, for not one feature needed the calling to Ms mind, he knew that, even in her gentle disbelief, she had brought strength and vigor to his loftiest purpose.

And so his thoughts were cause as the day wore on, no longer for him to regard himself with blame, but a growing joy that now he could look into a woman’s eyes without the tumult of emotion he had known before, but binding the uplifting of Ms spirit to the noblest of ideals.

This, in those two long years, was the first test of what solitude and fasting of his body had brought him. So it was not the sudden change he had found, but the gradual transformation she had discovered for him in himself. This was what indeed he had become, for now he knew Ms mind was calm above the distress and hunger of desire. Never might he see her again and yet the beauty Ms imagination made in her, far passed the deliberate beauty in her face. So he knew a man might love a woman, when earthly beauty had long left her and no distressing hand of Death could rob her of the beauty that he saw.

In an ecstasy at the thought that so he too might love Anna Quartermaine, he threw open his cabin door, strode out into the light of day and climbed through the banks of sunshine to the peaks where they had stood together.

“There’s where I live,” she had said and still he could see the whiteness of her hand that looked so small and yet so strong to point across the world beneath them.

That was where she lived and there, seating himself on the tough mountain grass, he turned his eyes and gave that spirit he had written of, to a bird in flight, that bore him upwards and upwards until his soul leaned out and found such beauty in these new-found thoughts of her, as made death seem a little thing beside.

Each day he went there to the summit of Knockshunahallion and now was spurred to energies his mind had never known for all the days of those two solitary years. Lying out there, sometimes the peak an island alone above the sunny mists that drifted past below, he wrote his songs and spoke them out as though she in her valley could hear his voice across the moors.

A day will rise in die golden dawn,
When the mists swim into the sea of mom,
And the naked sun under Knocknashoul
Will steep his limbs in the mountain pool—
On such a day will my love be born.

A day will come, though the days are late,
When I hold your hand as those that wait
With bell and monstrance and Holy Bread,
Who take God’s cup to the Altar head
And lift it high at the Holy Gate.

A day will dawn when I may gaze
Beyond the day of other days,
And looking deep within your eyes
Shall find the world were ne’er so wise,
Knowing death cannot part our ways.

This he wrote, and many of the love poems compiled in that one book of songs he made.

It was on the fourth day, when the evening drew in about him and he saw the light kindled in Mala-chi’s cottage on Crow Hill, that he gathered all the songs he had written and came down the mountain, leaping over the bowlders and striding heedlessly over the hidden paths, for the joy of life that was in him.

To his knocking on the door, Malachi came and let him in, and closed the door behind him and drew out the chair from by the dresser where he was used to sit and he reading his songs in the night-time.

It was not until he had heard them all and had turned the tobacco in his mouth and spat three times into the fire that Malachi spoke.

“Isn’t it the plovers go winding over the fields and the moors,” said he, “and they crying out their songs on the windy nights till they’d be finding a mate would make her nest wid ’em? Yirra, Glory be to God, hadn’t I hopes of ye and ye makin’ yeer songs out of die wonders of the western world? And now ’ds herself, and didn’t I see her and she coming out of great places in Lismore looking for ye, ’ds herself has set the spell of her eyes on ye the way ye’ll be swimming the waters and walking the land to get to her. And won’t she bring the silence into yeer voice that would sing like a blackbird in a thorn bush when the white blossom is dhropping to the ground? Won’t she be persuading ye ’ds the world in herself, and ye looking in her eyes like a young calf hungry for its mother and all the strength in ye goin’ out like water dhropping.”

He put away the verses he had gathered and swore his oath to Malachi that it was not so.

‘‘Is it the way ye’ll never see her again?” Malachi asked and his voice was bitter as the taste of aloes is.

He could not give promise to that. He had left her alone on the road that night. He had strode off into the darkness and never a word of good-bye had he said because of the fear of the thing he had learnt that day. But now he knew, and gave his oath, that he loved almost as he had wished for love and every thought in him was above desire and his heart would be strong until that day when he could give her the mastery of himself.

“I shall say good-bye,” he said, ‘‘and she will know why I go and the day when I shall come back. And the thought of her will be about me through the nights and I shall come the faster through her to the end of my servitude.”

Malachi stirred the lire with an iron rod. Then he took the handle of the bellows-wheel in his hand and for long moments they watched the sparks gathering out of the peat and flying upwards into the black heart of the chimney.

"Let ye not be goin’ down from the mountains to herself," said he at last. “That word of parting is not a word the women will listen to. Won't it set the eyes of her more surely on ye and she stretching out her hand in the darkness and her voice crying out to ye across the windy places of the hills? For once ye say that word to a woman doesn’t it put the badness in her blood would bum and starve her soul till not the winds nor the storms nor the lonesomeness of the way would be keepin’ her from ye?”

"Still I must go," Anthony Sorel replied, "for then I shall know what strength there is in me and how near I may be to the hour when I can love with fulfillment that is not the satisfied hunger of desire. I shall say good-bye and I shall come away and then one day when the tumult of life is gone from me, I shall come down the mountain again to find her."

" ’Tis not a woman will wait for that," said Malachi. .

"Then at least I shall know I have loved,-’ said Anthony Sorel—“and can a man know more?”

Malachi stood up and beat his fist upon the wall.

“Ye have the songs and all the beauty of the world,” said he, “and there are voices in the silence of the hills for ye and there are truths a man can’t see but he walks about from one place to another till his days be over him and yeerself would go to the call of a woman an’ she beckonin’ ye to the white gentleness of her breast where men sleep and wake with all truth gone out of them. Haven’t I seen it the world over and didn’t I set my heart on ye and ye straining yeer ears to the cries of ’em, like the Greeks sailing between the islands and they with the wax in their ears the way they’d hear no voices of women bringing them to destruction. Cry the goodbye to her and ye standing up there on the tilt of the mountains and let yeer voice go out with the wind that blows over the valley in the ways of her. But let ye go down and may the God Almighty be at the right hand of ye for ’tis not a woman will take that word from the lips of a man her eyes are set on. Let you go down and all the nights after will be full of the voice of her, for ’tis women have the ways of Hell when a man shall set his soul against ’em.”

“Still—I shall go,” Anthony Sorel replied in the quiet confidence of his voice.

And there they sat talking between the silences until the night was worn by their words into the day.

CHAPTER XI

SHE had spoken, as they parted that night, of some hope that one day he would come down from his mountains and visit her in her valley. And now one morning, when a week had gone by, as she was tending to her garden, training the tendrils of her seedlings of sweet-peas in the way they should go, she looked up at the sound of footsteps and saw Anthony Sorel coming towards her between the long green lines of thick-set box.

He might have seen her glance at the rough gardening apron that she wore, the swift look at her hands which in a garden were clean enough, the quick motion putting back the loose hair that had fallen over her forehead as she stooped; countless other little things he might have observed as he came down the garden path but his eyes were not for these. They were for her eyes and the thoughts that lay behind them.

Another woman might have excused herself, have complained of the untidy apron, mourned over her hands, holding them with the mold upon them that he might have known their beauty notwithstanding. Indeed to any other man, Anna Quartermaine might have done this herself. To Anthony Sorel she stood, merely expressing her surprise, conscious again of that deeper pulse in her heart which beat but did not flutter in its emotion.

“I have been wondering should I see you again,” she said, and in that reserve expressed all the thoughts that had persistently occupied her mind from the moment of their parting.

“I didn’t wonder,” said he—“I meant to see you again—” and thereby, without reserve, in such a way as a child might tell the simple truth, showed her without his knowing it, his thoughts had been of her.

Knowing him so little and in an eagerness for his gift of admiration, she asked him why—why had he meant to see her again.

“Because,”'he said—“because I had not properly said good-bye. There are no such things as manners between a man and himself. You live here and expect them. Didn’t I turn on my heel and walk away across the moors, leaving you the rest of your way home alone and at night? It didn’t occur to me till two days had gone by that I should have seen you to your house, that you would naturally expect it, not that it wasn’t safe but—but—” he smiled—“Oh—just manners. I don’t meet with people like yourself and so I have no need of them.”

This was why he had meant to see her—to say good-bye. Had she thought it was that, she might not have asked him. There was but little effort in her to hide her disappointment. She stood there in silence, pulling on her garden gloves as though that interest of her flowers at least was left her. She stooped and picked up from the path the box filled with the supports for her seedlings. Then she looked at him.

“See my garden first,” said she and wondered to herself why she so quietly accepted parting at his hands, when in such a mood, she would under some pretext have refused it at another's.

With his eyes he consented. Indeed it was with his eyes he spoke more often than with his lips. She knew him best and thought of him most for the silence of his voice.

The Darwin tulips were in bud, some burst in flower. The great clusters of their formal green buds were full of simple conception like the decoration that a child might make with patient fingers for its task, capable only of artless repetition.

He knew nothing of the names and ways of flowers. They were only colors out of the earth to him, jewels, as when a woman opens her treasure store and spreads out her gems wondering and debating which she will wear. And there were colors in generous plenty for him in her garden.

The scent of late violets, lingering on, was soft in the air. Wallflowers were still just in bloom. It was that moment of a garden in Spring when Nature gives with both hands before the arms of Summer are full of roses. He could have chosen no better time for apology for his manners.

She stole sharp glances at his face as they walked in silence and knew, as in moments when he stood still, like some creature drinking water on a parching day of thirst, that, despite himself, emotions were moving in him and so secretly that he had no thought of their control.

Down one path they wandered and up another. Here there were windflowers turning to the sun; there the aubretia was mingling purple and mauve with the forget-me-not and its blue. With the aid of her gardeners, she had not spent those years upon her garden in vain. In one of those glances as she looked at him, she felt she knew the purpose it had been.

Yet she waited for him to speak, leaving him all the warmth of emotion that filled his long silence. Here she stopped to pick a faded blossom from its stalk, there she pulled a weed as though each bed of flowers was a bed where children slept, needing tenderness. Once she plucked a violet and fastened it in the bosom of her dress. And still he was silent, with his eyes drinking the colors in and the sun heating the air until it seemed as if they scarcely walked on earth at all.

Then in the midst of a path between a wilderness of roses laden with their little swelling buds, he stopped again. At last he spoke.

“Why did you want me to see your garden first?” he asked.

With him she was deprived of all consciousness in her motives and could not answer why. Unless it was that she loved her flowers with the proud love gardeners have, usurping almost the agency of God, talking of their roses as if the earth had never fed them. Unless it were that, she told him. She knew no other cause.

“Don’t you love my garden?” she added.

He stretched out his arms as though he had been asleep, when dreams of impossible things had disturbed the even measure of his mind. She felt that he was urging himself to awake to his old determinations.

“It’s full of emotions,” he said. “Colors always are.”

She looked at him curiously.

“Why do you despise emotions so?” she inquired.

He made a gesture as though he were shaking himself free of sensations that oppressed him. He turned his head and looked straight into the light of the sun until there must have been a dazzling blindness in his eyes.

“I don’t despise them,” he replied—“they despise me—have despised me—all my life.” He looked at her suddenly, his sight all blinded by the glare of sun so that she knew he could scarcely see her face. “Don’t you understand why I live as I do?” he asked and with more emotion in his voice than she had yet heard. “When I told you to think over to yourself whether I were queer or not, didn’t you come at some idea of meaning about me?”

“No.”

She spoke under her breath. Her voice was as still as the air the violets were softening with their scent.

“Didn’t I tell you the other day up in the mountains that I was trying to find calmness and strength for my mind? Didn’t you understand what I meant?”

“I thought I did,” said she—“then, I thought I did. Now, I don’t understand at all.”

“Well, then,” he said suddenly—“I’m thirty-three—half of my life gone, nearly all my youth. One learns about oneself by the mere actions of one’s life, without die need for self-analysis. I’ve learnt about myself. First emotion deceives and then despises me. That is what I have learnt. Now I’m learning, up in those mountains alone, how I can invigorate my mind without the sensations that emotion sets at havoc and keeps in endless tumult. Life need not be made up of sensations, I used to think it was nothing else. Everybody does—more or less, according to the strength of their emotions. Not once, but many times, I’ve thought I knew what love was. Emotion has deceived and then despised me. If that is myself then I must rise above myself; for what it is in me I don’t know, but something convinces me that love and all the great emotions in life are not of the body, but only of the mind; are not sensations, beating you like a storm at sea, but visions, such as the prophets saw before die world was fettered with its civilization. They are the miracles of life which modem culture has reduced to mere sensations. What in days gone by they saw in their minds, we see in our eyes; what they felt in their souls, we feel in our bodies. When they fought with the sword, rightly or wrongly, they fought for ideas. But now when we fight, rightly or wrongly, we fight for the welfare of our bodies. Can’t you understand? I want to see the miraculous in life; I want my emotions to become visions of the highest things in this world or the next, not the sensations that cast me into despair or fling me high upon a giddy pinnacle of hope. Oh—I can’t explain it any better than that. It is not meant to be explained. If there is anything that is God in a man, that is what I want to be, not just the ready instrument in the hands of Nature. I don’t know why I go on trying to explain it to you. I have kept silence these last two years and not even tried to explain it to myself. I know what I mean—that has been sufficient for me till now. Now I find myself floundering in a bewildering morass of words, endeavoring to explain to you what cannot be explained with words, what indeed words can only serve to conceal.”

He might not know why he tried to explain it all to her, but instinct as swift as it was sure gave her sight of it She stood there looking at his face in the sunlight, the half-timid sensitiveness of it and yet, above all that, the nervous strength of enduring purpose, and then her mind fastened itself on one of those prophetic determinations women so often came upon. She would not lose him, she declared to herself. Whether it were emotion or the laws of Nature, or any of those factors he was endeavoring to master in himself, for herself she recognized that essence of inevitability which admits no argument but moves to its purpose as irrevocably as the clouds across the sky. Once with the knowledge of that determination, she set out to show him how inevitable it was by those methods of concealment with which only a woman knows how to divulge the secret she would wish made known.

“Your words don’t confuse it to me,” she said gently. “I know what you mean now. But I don’t know why you should say your youth is almost gone. Aren’t those wonderful ideas die privilege and very spirit of youth? Now I understand why you believe in faeries. Aren’t they some of your miracles in life?”

“Very earthly ones,” he replied—“those faeries in the mountains. I know of no faerie that is a symbol of great and uplifting ideals. Wherever there are faeries, you will only find them to be symbols of die emotions known to those people by whom they are seen. All the same it is only a consciousness of the inner life which makes them visible. That is why you find them in Ireland, but even then, only in those lonely places where civilization has not passed its hands across the eyes of the mind still eager to see. There is a saying which has been converted to the use of many—you must have heard it. We only get those Jews that we deserve. I’ve heard it put to that use in England. Here in the mountains we might well say—a man only sees the faeries he deserves.” '

“Have you ever seen a faerie?” she asked.

“I’ve seen lights across the hills,” he replied.

“Often I saw lights from the window of that little cabin of mine—often I heard sounds and once in the darkness a voice spoke to me. That was when I first came to Knodcshunahallion. Now I have no light of fear to see, no voice of desires to hear. If ever a faerie comes to me, I shall know that I am failing in the strength and calmness of my mind.”

Much as a knowledge of him was coming to her, she could not contain the wonder in her eyes.

“I’m sure you’re the strangest man I’ve ever met,” she said. “I can quite understand now, how you believe that was faerie music in Mary Coyne’s ears. Almost I can believe it myself. Is she any better? Is she going to have the operation done? I suppose she will when she really comes to realize how serious It is.

He smiled as he told her there was no belief in her as yet.

“Don’t you remember,” he said, “how I told you that Mary Coyne would die that night?”

“Yes—you said so.”

“Well—she died.”

All her understanding of him in that moment seemed to leave her. She stood there on the path beside him, understanding and but dimly only herself.

“How did you know she would?” she asked.

“She meant to die,” he answered. “Of course they say the faeries have taken her, and of course they have. She has been taken by die faerie she deserved. Her beauty killed her.”

Now without doubt he had passed her understanding. What did he mean? What was it he believed ? The night in Mrs. Coyne's cottage came rudely bade to her. Of a sudden she remembered all the things that die old woman had said before her frenzy was spent. She remembered how he had let her speak, saying she had authority. At the time, she had believed he said it merely to humor the old woman’s madness; but now, superstition, which is the beginning of faith, was troubling her mind with the thought that there was truth in her prophecy.

“Do you mean to say—” she asked—“do you mean to say you believe in what that old woman said that night? That you would be taken by the faeries and that I should come by death in my dreams?’’

The very words as she said them fell on her ears with all the sound of their improbability, yet it was the apprehensive fear in her which comes with superstition that brought them without hesitation to her lips.

“Do you believe?’’ she said again because she saw in him die moment’s hesitation to reply.

“What is die good of my saying?’’ he asked. “Visions mean nothing to you. Here’s your life— here in this garden. We don’t even look at those flowers alike. You know all about the nature of them, their names, die soil they love, the soil they starve in. It’s in their material sense they have meaning to you. I don’t say that in contempt. Good heavens! their material meaning is beautiful enough.

But it’s not die beauty I want to see.” He held out his hand as though he were thrusting it into the flame for ever to be burnt “Please let me go,” he said. “I’ve been building a Tower of Babel when I talked die other day with you up in my cabin; I’ve been building it ever since, been building it this morning while I talked to you again. Now it has come about my ears. We talk in different tongues. Don’t you see that? Beside you I’m abnormal, odd, queer. I am queer; but no less than you are to me. But yours is the great stream where almost all swimmers seek the current. I’m floundering in a far sea where the tides are treacherous and from which no swimmer has ever returned to make his chart of the way. Please let me go. Good-bye.”

She would not take his hand. However incomprehensible he was, she yet had made her determination. She would not lose him so.

“Tell me,” she insisted. “I must know. Did you believe what that old woman said?”

“I believe she saw what she said,” he replied— “But no man's Fate is irrevocable. So I may be steering, but the rudder is in my hands and I know die rocks that threaten. Don’t you realize that that is why I am going now?”

“I shan’t say good-bye,” she replied.

He dropped the hand to his side.

“Then I must go without,” he replied and turned on his heel down the path between the thick-set box.

She tried to call him back, but it was not only her unfamiliarity with his name that stifled the words on her lips. She could not speak. He had destroyed the power of it on her tongue. Even when he had turned out of sight beyond a bed of flaming tulips, she still stood there in silence where he had left her.

CHAPTER XII

THAT evening Anna Quartermaine sent one of her brief invitations to Father Nolan. The day of sunshine it had been, had turned to showers of heavy rain. He came notwithstanding. Rain was not the excuse she would permit him. His old umbrella stood in a pool in a corner of the hall to prove what he had come through. He looked at the pool; wistfully at the muddy bottoms of his trousers and then he was shown into her little boudoir where, against all precedent, she was ready to receive him.

This was a new mood, a strange mood. He took her hand warmly—that warmth always allowed him —and held it there, looking inquiringly into her eyes. She let him look and tried her best to smile. But she never meant it to be a success. She meant him to see the effort and fully intended he should see it fail.

The whole matter was that she wanted sympathy and needed it to be given without the trouble of asking. The failure of her smile, that was the utmost expression of her request.

He patted her hand in the fatherly way he had with him and asked her what the matter was.

“Come and eat your dinner,” said she, for it was not to be told so readily as all that. There being some matter on her mind, she required at least that it should be humored out of her. The joy of telling was not to be found in point-blank confession. Indeed she ordered her life so that even her depressions afforded her some enjoyment. The contemplation of his doing his utmost all through the meal to find out what was distressing her, distressing himself in the effort, perhaps spoiling his dinner—which, though she did not wish it exactly, yet could not be helped—this was die enjoyment she sought for in her mood.

It may be supposed she found it with the charm of the ways she had. There never was a more sympathetic nature than that of Father Nolan; and when it was a woman in distress and that woman was Anna Quartermaine, he could take almost the color of her mood, turning himself to that exact pitch of receptivity when confession becomes the natural instinct of the mind.

His dinner was spoiled. That had to be. She could not properly have enjoyed her mood unless. It was essential to the whole condition of things that she should see him fretting over her. All those who had any affection for her were willing enough to do that. Father Nolan was one of them and if he needed any consolation for the spoiling of his meal, found it cheerfully enough in the fact that it was Friday—a proper day for such a sacrifice.

Not until they were back again in her little room, taking their coffee out of Lowestoft cups—china, the character of which had many resemblances to her— not until then, did she begin to yield to the gentle pressure of his questions.

She was unhappy, she said, because she had heard from her celibate—this was the comprehensive way she named him to Father Nolan—that she was not going to see him again.

“He writes good-bye,” said she, “and that’s a word that depresses me more than anything else. Why are men so frightfully, frightfully stupid? I hate losing people. Don’t you know that about me? I hate it.”

“You’re going to lose him then?”

“Indeed I’m not,” said she and, had it been the moment to laugh at her, he would have laughed at her then. But it was no such moment. His face was a picture of solemnity as he returned her look of settled determination.

“What brought about the writing of this letter?” he asked presently. “Why suddenly does it come over him, the way he must say good-bye after all this time?”

“He doesn’t explain,” she replied. “He gives me no reasons—just says good-bye. As if things could end like that. Aren’t men fools I”

“Why fools?” said he.

“Well—because it was so wonderful as it was. He was so absolutely different from anyone else.”

“Is it the way you don’t like him now at all?”

“No—can’t you see—I’m in love with him now. That’s what’s making me so miserable. Oh, aren’t men fools! As if any woman would say good-bye to them, once—once-”

Her eyes, the expression of her lips, the way she clutched one hand upon another, all finished that sentence for her. He knew what she meant and now could afford to relax that solemnity he had assumed. It was not exactly a moment for laughter, but he knew she would expect him to be amused.

“Oh yes—you can smile," she said at once, “and so can I—but it’s not a smile. It's only a grin."

Suddenly then her whole manner changed. She had let him win her out of her mood and at no greater cost than the enjoyment of his dinner. Many a man had had to pay more than that for the privilege. She even had let him make her smile. But now the mood was gone and, half with the suspicion of tears in her eyes, she was showing him her real self.

Leaning forward in her chair, she laid a hand on his and tightened her fingers about it, hoping to see him wince because the pride of her hands was that they were strong. He did wince; just a twitch of his eyelids. It was enough for her to see. She felt no disappointment to hinder her emotions.

“Do you think I shall lose him?” she whispered. “You’re a man—you’re a celibate—you know what men feel when they get these ridiculous notions into their heads.”

Never did she stop to think how her words reflected upon him. These ridiculous notions I He could smile at her then, knowing how little she understood, yet realizing how deep an impression those very ridiculous notions had made upon her.

“What does he gain out of life?” she went on, still too emotional to choose her words. So intimately as this she might have spoken to another woman, but that women meant little or nothing to her. Father Nolan had long discovered that being spiritual adviser to Anna Quartermaine entailed capacities which demanded the utmost resources of his nature. He was a celibate priest and there he was expected to sit quietly beside her, telling her what were the feelings of a man who got these ridiculous notions of celibacy into his head. Without a vivid sense of humor he might well have stopped at that. But her judgment of him took that quality for granted. He must give a satisfactory account of his own attitude of mind. Nothing short of that would content her.

“Well—what does he gain?” she persisted, for with every intention in the world to reply as best he could, he was yet slow of answering. “It seems meaningless to me. Life is life. We’ve been given our emotions; why should we be ashamed of them? Why should we suppose that they do nothing but deceive us?”

“Is that what he supposes?”

“That’s what he says. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever felt that your emotions destroyed your own power of yourself?”

“I’m a priest,” said he in self-defense, half hoping that the reminder might give her pause to think.

She took no notice of it. Thoughts were too swift in her for arrest such as that.

“I know—I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m asking you. You've had your vows taken all these years.”

“Yirra, we won’t say how many,” said he.

“Well—did you become a priest because you were afraid of your emotions?”

“I did not,” said he. “I became a priest because me father put a stick across me back when I said I didn’t want to go to Maynooth—and I’ve remained a priest—” his voice altered—“because ’tis the way a priest can have a clearer mind for understanding the ways of God than him that is being swept this way and that with the desires that do be in him.”

“You mean that?” she asked. He heard the note of trouble in her voice.

“I do,” said he.

“That’s what he said.” She took her hands from his hands and leant back again in her chair. “That’s what he said—that there was something of God in a man and he was living to find it in himself.”

“You’d better tell him,” said Father Nolan, “that the priesthood is open to him. Wouldn’t he be wasting his time in this world with ideas like that?”

“He’s not a priest,” said she. “He’d never be a priest. Some of the things he says would make the hairs of orthodoxy stand up on your dear old religious head.”

“That doesn’t make him any die less of a priest,” he replied, “no more than falling in love with him the moment he’s gone from ye makes ye any the less of a woman.”

She was not prepared to see the twinkle in his eye just then and asked him simply if he did really think that was so unlike a woman. Receiving no answer, she looked up quickly and then she knew.

“Oh no—don’t make fun of me,” she begged. “I am unhappy—I’m really terribly unhappy. I say I won’t let him go. But you don’t know that look in his eyes as I do. What shall I do if I never see him again? What shall I do?” She was not asking for an answer to that; did not wait for it. From one attitude, from one aspect to another, her mind was racing and, leaping back now to what he had just said, she asked him what he meant by his allusions to the priesthood.

“Why isn’t he any the less of a priest?” she wanted to know.

“Because what I can gather of the young man,” said he. “Is he a young man?”

“About thirty-five.”

He thought of his own twenty years added to that and declared it was a fine age for a man to have such knowledge of himself.

“But from what I can gather of him,” he went on, “he’s the type priests are made of. Mind ye, they are not all priests that take the collar. They are not. And there’s many a man in a hateful red tunic or a jaunty Caroline would be better dressed in a stole and cassock. Shure ’tis the Church gives a man the collar that he wears, but isn’t it God Almighty that makes die man what he is? It is indeed. That young man is a priest not because his father has never laid a sthick across his back, but because God put the spirit of it in his heart. One like himself will never be destroyed by a woman, or if he is, ’twill break the heart in him.”

“Yes—that’s all very well,” said she, in arms at once against die attitude he took, “but how about me? Don’t I count at all? Am I to be absolutely put aside?”

“And who’s putting you aside?” he returned. “Did Major Allen put ye aside? Did all the other men who’ve ever been in love with ye—and God knows how many lingers I have on my hands and what good they’d be to me—did they put ye aside? Glory be to God, me dear child, it is not love ye’re after wanting.”

“What is it then?”

“ ’Tis that thing whatever it may be that ye can’t get. And that’s the truth I’m telling ye. Faith, ye’re one of those women whose spirits are too high for the body God has given ye—beautiful though it is.”

She touched his hand. It was just thanking him for that, even though he never noticed it.

“I suppose there’s a call for ye,” he went on, “though the Almighty God knows what it is. I wouldn’t hazard a guess meself, unless it was that ye’re sent into the world to make life difficult for the men who are meant to rise by reason of the difficulties they encounter. Unless ’tis that, I can’t see the good of ye at all.”

She looked up at him with puckered lips.

“You don’t think very much of me then?” she said—as she could say it, not too childishly, but with big eyes, genuinely wistful.

“If ye look like that at the young man,” said he, “he’ll need all the priest that’s in him by Nature. Maynooth ’ud never save him if ye look at him like that.”

She more than touched his hand. Now she took it in hers again.

“Well—say then,” she said eagerly, “say that you don’t believe what you said about him before?”

“What was that?”

“That he idealized me—but that he might go away and marry someone else.”

“Wouldn’t it be happier for him?” said he.

“Oh—I don’t know whether it ’ud be happier— perhaps it would. But say he won’t.”

“Well—now—I wouldn’t say that at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because he might. But ye can be satisfied in yourself that it wouldn’t be anyone ye’d be jealous of. That sort of man when he does marry, needs a creature that doesn’t begin to know the sort of husband she’s got and is no more a part of his real life than the coat he lays on his back.”

“Do you mean a sort of peasant woman?” She thought of Mary Coyne with her undeveloped mind and the wonderful beauty of her face. Did he mean such a woman as that? She thought of Anthony Sorel at the cross roads where often he had told her, he stood and watched the girls and young men dancing. Did he mean a woman as one of those? A dread swept into her heart that it might be true when—“Oh—what a shame that would be!” she cried. “Surely a man like that couldn’t be wasted in such a way.”

“I don't know would it be a waste?” said Father Nolan slowly. “With such a woman as that, ye might scarcely say he was married at all. She’d never stand in die pathway he's walking in. I dunno would it be a waste. It might be the only thing for him. Then he’d keep ye in his mind—the ideal untouched—for the remainder of his life and maybe he’d be telling the good girl he was married to all about ye.”

“Tell her how much he loved me and she’d listen, never saying a word.” This she joined in with, seeing the picture far clearer than he. “But, Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you call that a waste! What’s the matter with me-?” She impelled him now to look at her. “What harm should I bring to him? You talk about me as if I were a thing to be avoided. Am I as horrible as all that?”

He shook his head backwards and forwards as one who gave up all hope of understanding. Even here, he could see the net she was spreading to catch him. Was she as horrible as all that? What a question! Yet he set out boldly to answer it.

“Ye have the laws of Nature in the bones of ye,” said he, “and a man of his kind would be doing well for himself if he went to the other ends of the earth than be meeting ye. Don’t ye know that yourself? Isn’t this young fella after saying there is something of God in a man and shure it isn’t that in him would be any good to Nature at all. ’Tis not marriage he’s wanting, which is an earthly sacrament death can put an end to; ’tis something which denies death, something which the life ye’d bring him would only destroy with the fear of death. Surely to God the less ye lay hold on life in this world, the easier it is to let it go in the hour of severance. But the laws of Nature are quick in yeer veins, die way ye’d have him bind up his life with your own and the children he’d bring ye, so that the fear of death would come quick to him at night while ye lay suffering on a bed of childbirth. That young man’s a priest, I tell ye, and whether he wears the collar or not he’ll strive as much as any man of the Church to keep the distance of ye.”

He had spoken now in the fearlessness of what he believed, feeling, despite his friendship for her, all his sympathies given out to this young man; knowing the difficulties of the way he had chosen and believing how nothing but the sanctuary of the Church could save him when once she had set her heart upon his capture.

He rose to his feet now and looked wistfully again at the muddy bottoms of his trousers.

“Tell him from me,” said he, “that only the Church’ll save him. That young man ought to be a monk in Melleray and never speak to a woman again, if ’tis the way he would keep to the path he’s walking in. The world is no place for him. ’Tis there he can keep ye the ideal woman in his mind and be silent for the rest of his life. Tell him that from me,” he added and turned then to go-

“You’re only thinking for him—you don’t think for me at all,” said she.

“Faith, I’ve never met anybody could do their own thinking better than ye can yeerself,” he replied.

“Aren’t ye thinking now as hard as yeer brain’ll let ye, the way ye can bring him back to ye? Isn’t that what ye’re thinking?”

“He shan’t go and throw himself away on a peasant woman,” she declared. “I’ll save him from that.”

“I’d trust ye for that,” said he. “That young fella has chosen a path no woman has ever let a man walk in yet. I shall be marrying the two of ye one day and I’ve no doubt he’ll have the sense to bless me for it for the rest of his life. But he won’t be the man he was and he knows it now.”

He went to the door and opened it, then turned again.

“Yeer gardener—Michael—told me ye had a young man seeing round the garden to-day. Is it the way ye’re going to take another man’s advice about yeer own garden?”

“I might,” said she.

“Michael will never forgive ye if ye do,” said he. “Oh yes, he will,” she replied—“Why, everybody forgives me—even you.”

CHAPTER XIII

ANTHONY SOREL came back to his cabin in the mountains as a man returns from his pilgrimage to a holy shrine.

A new vigor was in him, a higher exaltation than he had ever reached. The very earth he trod was buoyant underneath his feet. With every lark that rose out of die heather, his heart went with it up into the burnished sky.

There was victory in sight of him. In those two years of solitude, he now believed he had found the mastery of emotion. He could look at the thing he loved without desire of that bodily sensation of possession. He could put her out of the immediate demands of his life as, coming to the hour of his labor, a man might put down a child from his knees. Another lonely year perhaps with that ideal before his eyes and he might have knowledge of his soul to claim the thing he loved without fear that his emotions would deceive him.

Yet so swift had it been, that there still were moments when he sat alone, in which he doubted of himself. Her beauty, not in each separate feature, but that beauty he saw in all her face, meaning the beauty to him he found within her mind, came back again and again to him in his meditations.

Then one night he dreamt he stood beside the lake that lies in that depthless hollow of Knockshunahal-lion and, as he watched the water, black as the ash-tree buds, there rose out of the deep fathoms, bubbles, that quivered to the surface and became her eyes. Then, as they looked at him, her whole face rose out of the water’s edge and last of all, her body gleaming wet. With beckoning finger she called him to her. He stepped down into the water to her side.

It was not cold, the water, as it closed around him, but warm and heavy like a viscous stream. The warmth of it rose to his brain, stifling the will in him to yet turn back. But still her finger beckoned him and still with the heavy water like chains about his-limbs, he struggled on to reach her side. Then, when he was so near he could stretch out his hand and touch her, she lay her arms about his neck and slowly caught him down below the surface of the. lake; down, down, and down into the deep darkness where the water was chill as melted snow. There, winding his own arms about her, he clung^ to her for the warmth her body gave. And still they sank, until the light of sky was blotted out above their heads and darkness came as a thing that falls with a loud voice, deafening in the ears.

He awoke, his body trembling as he lay upon his bed. It was only a dream, he said, but until the dawn broke out across the hills, he could not shake off the warm touch of her arms from round his neck.

So came the doubt of himself out of the essence of that dream and all these things he told to Malachi one night as they sat together over the smoking fire of peat.

Malachi sat knotting his fingers and at intervals spitting into the fire as he listened. When he had made an end, telling him this and that, how he had said good-bye to Anna Quartermaine in the garden at Ballysaggartmore, the dream he had dreamt and all its lingering insistence in his mind, Malachi took the old iron rod that served him to poke the fire and stirred the smoldering peat. The crackling sparks leapt up into the blackness of the chimney and left a glow of light on both their faces that seemed to linger about them after the flame had gone.

“Wasn’t it I tellin’ ye,” he said at last—“wasn’t it I tellin’ ye the nights would be full of the voice of her and ye going to the South to set yeer eyes on her once again. ’Tis no woman will take the parting words from a man wanst the heart has gone out of her, an’ she lookin’ east and west in the night for the sight of him.”

Anthony Sorel stretched out his hands to the blaze of the fire and shivered, for the night had come about them chill in the mountains there with the late frosts of May.

“ ’Tis not she has come bade to me,” said he despondently, “but the call of my own self crying back out of the years that are behind me. And if it comes to me more, shan’t I open my ears to it, till the sight and the touch of her grow to the hunger in me and all the great hope that I’ve had in my soul be destroyed?”

He buried his face in bis hands when, like a father watching over his child, Malachi sat by the chimney corner, never taking his eyes from the stooping figure sitting there, motionless and dejected.

“ ’Tis yeerself has as much knowledge of women,” he said after a while, “as I’d be having meself of the four comers of heaven, or God Almighty Himself in His golden chair. Shure, isn’t there the devil in all women and wouldn’t they hold a man the way he’d be sthrainin’ and pullin’ like Dorgan’s jennet is spanceled and tied to the root of his elder tree?”

So they sat and so they talked, as men talk of women, when the fear of a woman is upon them and only courage comes to them as they sit alone.

“Am I never to know a woman again?” asked Anthony Sorel presently. “Is love always to be a thing of passionate emotion that makes me slave instead of master of myself? Have I lived here in the mountains these two years for nothing?”

Malachi cut another quid of tobacco in the homy palm of his hand. The dick of the knife as he shut it' was like the report of a pistol in that lonely silence.

“Would ye leave yeer cabin up there?” he asked bitterly as he thrust the tobacco in the accustomed comer of his mouth. “Would ye leave yeer cabin up there and go down to the mad diversions of the town land and get lost like John Troy is traipsing the big dries of the western world an’ he with the songs dead in him could sing like a mating thrush?”

He shook his hand above his head with prophetic gesture. “I tell ye this,” said he, “that the day ye come down from the windy hollows of those hills is the day ye come down from the heights yeer soul has climbed to and may the Almighty God keep my eyes from the light of that day, for there’s no such man since I came here living on the starving land could catch the music out of the wind or make a song to try the heart in me.” [ 2]

With the swift impulse of youth and the swifter impulse of a sudden exaltation of his heart’s desire, Anthony Sorel stretched out his hand and took the homy lingers that felt like knotted wood as he held them in his own.

“I won’t come down from the mountains,” he said slowly. “Not until I can stand here before God and swear I am the master of myself. When that day comes ’tis more than music I shall catch out of the mountain winds; ’tis more than trying the heart in you my songs will be doing then. Now her voice shall cry no longer to me in the still night. I’ll, put the wax in my ears and bind my limbs to my cabin door and you shall see the months go by and I coming alone to the spirit of mastery in my soul. That’s my oath to you and I-”

He stopped with a jerk of a sudden in his voice, for out of the penetrating silence of the surrounding hills, there came upon his ears the sound of a woman singing in the night outside. He glanced at Malachi, when he knew that to him alone the voice was audible. The old man stood there in the dim light of the peat fire, no more than expectancy upon his face as he waited for Anthony Sorel to make an end of what he was saying.

It was evident, Malachi had not heard, yet the voice was drawing nearer and the sound of her singing was vibrating like far echoes in his ears. It was then, as he listened, there came suddenly to his mind the words of Mrs. Coyne she had spoken to himself and Anna Quartermaine that night in Gorteeshall.

“ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ to ye,” she had said, “an’ ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are crossed and the night comes batterin’ with the wind across the mountains at yeer little door.”

And not those words only, but the words he had said in the garden to Anna Quartermaine herself, “A man only sees the faeries he deserves. If eyer I see a faerie, I shall know that I am failing im'the strength and calmness of my mind.”

Then what was this he heard, this voice of'-a woman, that came out of the hills where never a woman at that hour would dare to walk alone? Mary Coyne had heard the music of the faeries, had seen their enchanted fires, had followed them until they and death had overtaken her. Was it this, at the very moment of its highest confidence, that was to come to him?

He stood by the fire with his hand half lifted, his eyes, his ears, every sense in him brought to the service of listening to that voice.

“Yirra, what’s on ye?” asked Malachi.

“Can’t you hear?” he replied.

Malachi turned his head to one side.

“There are no sounds coming out of this night to me,” said he. “What is it ye’re after hearing yeerself?”

“A woman’s voice, singing—out there on the side of the hill. Now it’s nearer—and now nearer. Can’t you hear? Listen! She must be coming this way.”

The cry of a curlew flying up from the moors, broke .the stillness in Malachi’s deaf ears and then he too heard the faint notes, now dropping to silence, now rising again, the voice as of one who picked their way on a strange and venturesome path.

The fear of the unknown that comes to so many of us and swiftest of all to those who live in its solitude amongst the mountains and in the tenantless corners of the world, came like a rushing and a chilly wind upon Malachi then. He stood in the quivering half-lights of the still peat Are and his knees shook together and his eyes sought out in fear through the little window where the light of the moon was a silvered daylight on the sloping hills.

Anthony Sorel stood there beside him, no trembling in his limbs, but a chill whiteness about his lips. His eyes, too, were set upon that window square where the moonshine made the day of night and the pupils of his eyes were large and black and his lips were parted and he breathed as they breathe in a room of death.

And nearer and nearer came the singing of that voice, rising and falling, dropping to silence as a mountain stream that finds a level bed, lifting to music as when it tumbles to the tiny cataract.

Not one word passed between them while they waited, waited with that unspoken belief as one thought between them, in the sure knowledge she must pass that way.

At last, at the moment when they must see her go by, Malachi gripped his hand upon Anthony Sorel’s shoulder.

“ ’Tis Queen Maeve herself,” he whispered— “an’ she drawin’ the souls of men would be leaving the sides of their fires to be followin’ her.”

Then, through the window, the figure of a woman cut a black outline against the whiteness of the moon. For a moment she stopped and looked within. Both saw her face thrust dose against the pane. Her eyes distinguished them in that faint darkness. They stood as black as her against the fire.

“ ’Tis Mary Coyne,” whispered Malachi. “ ’Tis Mary Coyne an’ she coming back from the faeries to tread her feet once more on the sides of the hills.”

“ ’Tis not Mary Coyne,” Anthony Sorel replied below his breath. For in that instant’s sight, he had seen the look of Anna Quartermaine in the hooded face. Such a peasant girl as Mary Coyne doubtless she was; but there was that look of Anna Quartermaine’s eyes, of Anna Quartermaine’s lips as he had seen and felt them in his dream.

In another moment she had gone and then he knew the faerie he deserved had come to him. This was the symbol of his besetting emotion and deep as it struck the fear into his heart, he yet found his feet being drawn from him to the door.

“Where are ye going, Anthony Sorel?” cried Malachi in a trembling voice.

“Out on the hill,” he replied and there was all the sound of dreams in his voice—“out on the hill there to bring her back.”

As swift as his shivering limbs would let him move, Malachi ran to lay hands upon him then.

“For the love of God,” he begged, “leave her be! Isn’t there destruction in the singing of her voice, and wouldn’t the eyes of her be takin’ ye out of the world? For the love of the Almighty God leave her be I”

But his words fell like drops of water that splash upon the stones. Anthony Sorel had flung open die door and, as the moonlight rushed in, he had slipped out into the night

CHAPTER XIV

THE moonlight lay wide and white across the hills. It cast strange shadows behind the stunted thorn trees, the prevailing wind had swept out like a woman’s hair. In the distance, down the twisting path that wound through the clumps of heather, Anthony Sorel could see the figure of the peasant woman as she passed away to the moors.

Her head was covered with a shawl, as they wear it everywhere in the South; her skirt was short; her feet were bare. Now and again she stumbled as she walked, but still she was singing and the notes of her voice rose up into the height of the hills through the dear silver of the air as the song of a lark wings upwards into the heavens.

He stood outside the door of Malachi’s cabin, watching her, listening to her song, struggling yet within himself to the obedience of Malachi’s importuning. But back, again and again, came the sight of her face, her lips, her eyes, as when she had peered through the window. If this was indeed a faerie, the symbol of his overwhelming emotion, was it strength, was it not fear in the heart of him holding him back from the deliberate encounter?

The very emotion she had stirred in him, interpreted his hesitation thus. But once he had so considered it, he left no time to waiting. With quick strides he was after her down the mountain path. There was her dark green shawl, the sway of her short skirt but half-a-mile before him. When there was but scarce that distance left between them, she stopped and turned. He could see her face in the moonlight, the glint of her white feet against the dark ground.

She was waiting for him to come up with her and now, as he drew nearer, fear shortened the length of his stride. All the eagerness of pursuit that had stirred the blood in his veins was now gone from him. There was a chill at his heart and over and over again through his mind ran the prophetic words of Mrs. Coyne, “ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ to ye and ye taken by the faeries where the roads are crossed.”

Where the roads were crossed! And there stood that dark figure with its pale face and still white hands—there it stood at the edge of the cross roads that lead down into die valley and stretch across the whole length of the mountains’ feet.

As he came within some twenty yards or so of her, he stopped altogether as though consciously upon the edge of that enchanted faerie circle encompassing her about. There he stood and through the moonlight stared at her, his lips set closely, his eyes kindled with the unknown fear that was in him.

For some moments in silence they stood thus, the moonlight and the mountains all about them and those white, silvered ribbands of the roads unrolling away at either side till they became mere threads the distance wound upon a vanishing reel.

With a conscious effort at last, he forced the sound of his voice into the dry hollow of his throat. He felt the words awkward and stumbling on his tongue and the sound of them in that still air of the night was like the voice of one who speaks out of dreams far off in sleep.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“ ’Tis aiqual to God who I’d be,” said she, “and ye followin’ me in the lonesomeness of these hills are steeped and drowned in silence, the way I could hear ye steppin’ over the heather like thunder cornin’ on me.”

Her voice was as still and gentle as the winds that come in May. It might have been Anna Quartermaine herself speaking to him, for even to her voice, though in the deep richness of that inland brogue, there was the same fatal resemblance he had seen as she looked through the window-pane into Mala-chi’s little room.

“What are you doing out here on the mountains, now at this hour of the night?”

He put his questions in all the uncertain note of fear. She stood there by a gap in the loose stone wall that edged the road and there was laughter in her eyes because of his fear as she looked at him.

“Come dose to me now,” said she, “if ye’d need to be knowin’ so much about me. Shure what’s the fear on ye? Come dose to me now and I only a woman is sthandin’ here in this lone corner of the hills.”

“I’ll not come closer,“ he replied. “Don’t I know you’ve come out of the lake up there in Knockshunahallion? Didn’t I see your eyes and your face coming up out of the water to me in my dreams these two nights gone and didn’t you draw me with your body into the water till all the blackness of it was closed over us and I in your arms sinking down into the depths till the darkness was thunder in my ears?”

“Did I do that?” said she, peering with her eyes into his face that was turned from the moon and black in the darkness of its own shadow.

“You did,” he replied, “but I’ve had the warning of you that comes now shouting in my ears.”

“Ye’ve had warnin’ of me? There’s not one in these mountains would be knowin’ the sight of me this night.”

“ ’Twas not in knowledge of you,” he replied, “but the old woman in Gorteeshall who told the faeries would take me and I losing all the wisdom I’d got out of the silence of these hills and the hunger of my own heart for the truth. But she told wrong, for there’s strength in me yet can destroy the power of such as you.”

“What would be the power of a poor girrl the likes of me would have over a young fella the likes of ye is sthrong and lithesome wid the power of men?”

“ ’Tis no power of men,” said he, “would be holding to me now. Isn’t it the very power in a man is weakness in him that time when the passion in him comes dropping weak like water in his veins? ’Tis not because I’m strong and lithesome shall I be able to shut my ears and hear no voice of a woman calling to me across the hollows of these hills, but because there is the truth in me and while there’s that, I’ll have no fear of all the faeries in the world.”

She looked at him as he turned with his gaze across the sweep of the mountains and the moonlight fell on him. She saw the thin light of iiis lips and the glittering light of his eyes and she threw back her head, laughing softly for the fear that was in him.

“Isn’t the fear white with ye now?” said she and there was the laughter come into her voice to taunt him. “Come here to me now if there’s no fright on ye and tell me the voice of the woman is calling to ye now when the night comes down over the starving land. Come here to me now and tell me that.”

“I’ll not stir my feet from where I am,” said he, “for you know well the voice of the woman it is. Isn’t the light of her eyes in your eyes there and aren’t her lips the red of your lips and haven’t you stolen the beauty that’s in her face to come here tempting me into the mountains?"

In a sudden change his voice took power and command as he came to the mastery of his fear.

“Take the shawl off your head,” he demanded,

“and let me see is your hair the color and softness of hers.”

“How did ye know was her hair so soft?” she asked quickly, “an’ ye keeping yeer hands from the touch of her and starvin’ yeer eyes in the windy gaps of these hills?”

“Would it need the touch of my hands?” said he. “Isn’t it the most fatal beauty of a woman a man will find in the secret of his heart where the evil that’s in him comes singing the songs of passion in his ears? Take off the shawl from your head and let me see all the beauty you’ve stolen to bring here crying out to me this night.”

“Come yeerself to me now,” she answered. “Let yeer own fingers unknot it, if ye have the mind to see.”

One step he took towards her, no more. She stood leaning against the loose stone wall, her head thrown back, inviting him to unloose the shawl about her head. But the fear had come back upon him now. He trembled as he stood and the will in him to resist shook him in its conflict with the desire if only to touch her with his hands.

“Would ye have fear of a girrl is lost and wanderin’ on the mountain roads? Yirra, glory be to God, wouldn’t it be safe I’d be and no harm cornin’ to me at the fall of night if I could walk these ways and bring such fear to the men would be meetin’ me?”

He looked above him up the twisting path to where the faint light in Malachi’s cottage window pricked its point of orange in the silvered night. There he wished he was then and the longing was near to him that he had listened to Malachi’s words. For now the desire was strong in him to bend her in the strength of his arms, when all that he had striven for in those years of his solitude would be gone from him as water goes from a leaking pot, and the ideal he had raised of Anna Quartermaine in his mind would be further from him than ever.

It was the strength of his will he cried for then and the more his eyes fed upon the sight of her, the more faint it grew within him. For in this it was the temptation lay, that she had all the beauty of Anna Quartermaine, yet there in that peasant’s dress, with short-hung skirt and pale bare feet, gave him no moment of that quiet mind he had so firmly set his ideal upon.

Here indeed was the symbol of his besetting emotion; for now he knew how those two years of solitude had not completed the transfiguration of his soul. There still was the nature in him of the self-conscious man, a slave to the passions the world had born in him.

With her mind, or with all that which he believed of it, Anna Quartermaine had carried him still higher in the ambition of his soul. But now he had fallen to this, this sudden and most bitter knowledge of himself. He was not fit to love her yet. His dream indeed had shaken the deeper confidence in himself. But now as he stood there on the side of the hill, watching her eyes, her lips, her laughter as she laughed, he knew too well how long the way must be before he should reach the mastery of himself.

With a giant effort of his will in that moment, he summoned strength to him and held out his hand before him as though to keep distance between them. So he steeled the sight of his eyes, willing himself to see only with the clearer vision of his soul.

“If it were fear of you,” he said slowly at last, and measured his words to keep the needful balance of his mind, “if it were fear of you, should I be standing as I am with only the night between me and the thing I feared?”

“What fear is on ye then?” she asked in her gentlest voice. “Shure wouldn’t I be putting me arms about ye and holding ye like a babe has the hand of Death on its little throat?”

“ Tis fear of myself is on me,” said he, “the fear of a man when he comes to the evil that’s in him and sees vanishing the power of his soul like a ship put out to sea.” Then of a sudden without warning, he lifted up his voice and cried out in the pain of conflict in his mind. “Get back into the night,” he cried aloud. “Take your eyes away from me and your lips that smile and the songs that you sing. It’s not in one hour I’ll go back to the man that I was.”

“Is it drive me away?” she whispered, “and I a woman alone in the night with all the length of the roads and the wild hills in the face of me?”

“It is driving you away,” he replied, “and with the power of God, I shall never set these eyes on you again.”

She turned as though pride had come to her and, stepping through the gap of the loose stone wall, she climbed down into the road. Then she looked up at him once more, standing there black above her.

“ ’Tis more than ever a man has wished of me before,” she said, "and ’twill be a mighty thing the power of God will be if yeer eyes never set glance on me again. Keep your watch over the hills and through the slow hours of the night, for the power of God is a mighty thing, Anthony Sorel, but it sets no stay on the life a man must take or leave for himself.”

She knew his name! He heard the sound of it strange as it left her lips and came across the still air of the night to his ears.

"Who gave you the name I have?” he cried out to her, but only her laughter came back in answer ' to his cry, her laughter when it turned into the song in her voice once more as she swung her way down the hill road with her bare feet glistening beneath her skirt and her head thrown back in a young joy of the light of the moon.

A belt of oak trees flung shadows over the road where it turned down to the breadth of the moors and into these shadows as into a house he watched her figure go and, as a door that shuts out the night, they closed about her.

He still stood with his eyes straining to follow her as she went, but saw her no more again that night.

CHAPTER XV

ANTHONY SOREL did not return to Malachi’s cottage that night, but went back to his own cabin in the silence and the solitude of Knockshunahallion where all the hours until morning came he sat contemplating the thing he had seen and the meaning it was to him.

Now it seemed as if the spirits of faerie were all about him. An endless music was in his ears which now was low and soft as it might be the wind when it plays about the hollows and the crevices and then was loud and deafening to be heard like the noise of thunder rolling across the sky. He sat at his window and saw strange lights across the hills and there came to the sense of his nostrils soft perfumes like memories he strove with all the consciousness of his mind to recall but could never bring bade into the certain presence of his thoughts.

And all this while till the morning came, he remained motionless at the little square of his window, his eyes turned across, the moors below towards Ballysaggartmore and sometimes they were closed and sometimes they were open as with one who drifts between waking and sleep yet is never in the dear region of his consciousness.

At times he would speak beneath his breath and again at times cry out with a loud voice as if in pain; and once he cried the name of Anna Quartermaine, at which he trembled in himself as the echoes of it beat from wall to wall of his little cabin like a caged thing struggling to be free.

So- the night passed and the next day he walked about in the upper heights of the mountains, ceaselessly moving from one still place to another until all the energy in his body was a dead thing to him and he returned at evening exhausted to his cabin door.

That night he slept, but the mist of dreams was about his eyes and in the ceaseless industry of his brain. But now he knew the woman it was, who came beckoning to him out of the night of his dreams. In his sleep, though there was no power in him to resist her, he knew that in the morning with his walking, all the power that he had would return.

The next day, this time when it was scarce sunrise, he set out upon his wanderings once more. Sleep had brought him no rest but with the daylight had come energy and the still burning vigor in his soul. Taking bread and milk from a cottage here, a cabin there, he went on his way without thought of direction until, as the sun had begun its steady passage down the sky, he found his feet turning on the road to Ballysaggartmore.

At that realization, all movement in him was brought to sudden arrest; for in that moment had come back to his mind one of those perfumes that had touched his senses like memories which now he could recall. It wa9 the scent of the violets in Anna Quartermaine’s garden, of the violets and all the flowers which that morning had flung their odor into the warm air.

He stood trembling at the thought that his senses and all the conscious instincts of his body had been so much alive, even then. Did it mean that never had he come within sight of the ambition of his soul? Did it mean that all this mastery of his emotions had been a foolish, empty dream; that all a thousand years of solitude would never destroy the conscious man in him; that he was the same that day as he had ever been, as every man had been from the beginning and still would be?

With a cry of pain which no restraint in him could silence or subdue, he swiftly turned upon his heel and set his back towards the place where his ideal lay, fearing the self in him that could destroy the thing he cherished most Now he was coming to Ballyduff, where the road turns by a forge and bends up to a mere cart track across the wild acreage of moors. This way he went nor stopped again until he stood knocking on the door of Malachi’s cabin on Crow Hill.

In the act of making his evening tea, the old man heard the falling sound and set down his kettle in the embers. A light of gladness was in his eyes as he went to the door, for he knew well whose knocking it must be.

“God be wid this day,” said he as he opened the door and beheld Anthony Sorel standing there and then he saw the light that shone on his face from the damp sweat that was on him.

“In the name of God,” said he, closing the door— “In the name of God what’s on ye to be sweating like a young stallion is fretting the earth for his mare? What’s on ye, in the name of God? Haven’t I seen ye beyond over and up in the heights of the hills and ye traveling east and west like a man is pursued by all the devils of the dark places?”

He took him by the shoulders and sat him down in his own chair and stood over him like a shepherd that stands over the sheep he has found destroyed and exhausted in the black shadows of the glen.

“What’s after ye, Anthony Sorel?” he asked presently, for in the hands that covered the sweating brows and the knees that shook as he leant upon them, the old man could see that agony of spirit by which he was consumed. “What’s after ye?” he repeated.

“ ’Tis myself is after me,” Anthony Sorel replied. “ ’Tis by myself I am pursued. All these days since that witch brought the beauty of the woman in the valley up to me here in the mountains, have I been set upon by the man that is in me and cannot bring him down. From sunrise to the fall of the night I have walked the untrodden tracks of the mountains to kill the thoughts that are in me with fatigue. But in sleep I am not alone.” He wrung his hands before him as many a man indeed has done. “What has come to me?” he cried out. “Didn’t I say good-bye to her because I knew I could love her with the soul that was in me! And now is this curse of the body I have, to stand between me arid the thing I love?”

He buried his face in his hands again and there came once more the rush of the music to his ears and in the eyes his lingers pressed to blindness, great lights were flashing in a sea of burning red.

Malachi spat the juice of the tobacco from his mouth.

“Why didn’t ye take the words av an old man,” said he, “was after telling ye ’tis not in the ways of a woman to be parting her life from the man her heart is coming to? May the Lord Almighty have mercy on ye for the stricken man that ye are. Haven’t ye chosen a road is sore to the feet of a man, must be walking in the light of the day and the drift of the night and won’t the soul be destroyed in ye to leave it? Is it the way ye’re going maybe to leave the quiet places of these hills and the wisdom that is come to ye? Is that the way wid ye, Anthony Sorel? Are the soft breasts of her softer than the moss to yeer head when ye’d be sleepin’ alone on the hills at night, with the great darkness of the starry skies like the weight of dew, so geptle it would be on the lids of yeer eyes? Are the lips of her sweeter than the lips of a sthone, would be dropping sweet water from a mountain stream? Are the eyes of her brighter than the stars of God are lighting like candles about his golden chair?”

The note of his voice had fallen to a tone of in- finite sorrow as he spoke. In all the strange journeys he had made, he had seen the souls of men so beaten by the storm, so driven before the winds of passion as Anthony Sorel was driven then. And he knew how man is a man and God is a spirit, yet never had he known the spirit in a man so strong as he had seen it in Anthony Sorel. But now he could tell the end as surely as he had told it in others.

“Is it caught she has ye?” he went on in the same mournful note of his voice. “Is it caught she has ye in the long delay of her arms? Speak the truth to me now the way ye’d be speaking to the Lord God has ears from the far corners of His lonesome Heaven. Is this the last these old eyes will be seeing of ye on the hungry slopes of these hills?”

Anthony Sorel came to his feet that still were weak beneath him as he stood, and his head was thrown back and the fire of God was akindle once more in'his eyes.

“ ’Tis the last ye’ll see of me, Malachi,” he said, “but ’tis not to be drowned in her kisses I’m gone. There are further parts of the earth than this, where the winds of God would never find the ears of a man to be fighting his soul. I’ll go out far into the barren West where never a goat could find its food. ’Tis then when the nights drop still with the summer moon, you’ll hear the songs I’d be singing as I come past the man that is in me to the very feet of God Himself. I’ll go far from here and in two days these mountains will lose sight of me and ’tis not a woman nor the man that is in me shall destroy the ideal she’s set up in my mind.”

He took Malachi’s shoulders in his trembling hands and, as he looked in his eyes, there was a drop of sweat that rolled off his shining forehead and split itself upon the floor. And Malachi told him of a charm that would keep the evil faeries off of him and then he went out of the house and came to his own cabin by Knockshunahallion.

CHAPTER XVI

ALL the next day, Anthony Sorel made preparation for his going, but there were not many things that he would take with him, having no worldly goods but the crucifix that he had nailed to the wall, the chairs, the table, the candlesticks of brass and the bed that old Heggarty had died in.

It was not the preparation of collecting his property that he made, for all these things he would leave, except the crucifix and that he would carry under the cover of his coat when he went walking the world again to find another resting-place. It was the severance of his mind from the place that had grown upon him which was his occupation all the length of that day.

In the early morning, while the sun was yet hidden by the hills like a furnace rising out of the deep hollows into flame, he rose from his bed and went up to the lake where the woman with the beauty of Anna Quartermaine had first appeared to him in all the dreams that were coming to his sleep. This he did to test the strength he had in his going, for there yet were voices calling to him to be staying where he was; crying out that he was born a man and the joys and the pleasures of a man were his by the right of the mother who had borne him.

It was when he saw the black water and the bubbles rising white to the surface, that in his dreams had been her eyes, he knew how much strength had gone out of him, for his breath came quickly and he felt the warmth of her arms she had put about him and there came again, rushing to his ears, the noise of the music as the darkness of the water had closed over them.

By the side of the lake then he sat down and what had been prayers in any other man were thoughts and wonderings in him. And he pressed his eyes to blindness as he had done in Malachi’s cabin, but could not shut out the sound of the voices that called to him or the warm lights that brought heat to the blood in his veins.

He was knowing then how near he had come to the destruction of all that was highest in his soul and he rose from the stone on which he had been sitting and came down the mountain to his cabin again, saying all the time as he walked: “Tomorrow must see me gone—to-morrow must see me gone.”

But when it came towards evening and the light was paling and the sky had faded to primrose, he looked at his bed and feared the last night that he must sleep upon it for the dreams that might come to him and the warm beauty of the woman they might bring to his side.

It was the last strength he needed to keep him to the determination his mind was set upon, yet it was the last strength he knew was failing in him then. Another night of his dreams and in the morning he knew that courage might well have gone from him.

At the square of his little window he sat, looking down the mountain slope and across the moorlands to the cluster of trees that hid the faint roofs of the houses in Ballysaggartmore. And as he looked, the name of the woman whose beauty had brought him both pain and destruction came hesitating to his lips, for fear of the longing it might bring to him.

But as he said it, there seemed to return to him that strength when he had said good-bye to her in her happy garden. He gave it leave to pass his lips again and then he knew where he could find the strength to face that night alone.

One moment’s sight of her—the sight, no more— would restore once again the power of his ideal, would equip him with courage to bear the burden of that last and lonely night.

He rose, quick to his feet, strong in the warmth of his new conviction. She had inspired him to the knowledge of the truth he had learnt in those years of his solitude. Then it was she again who should arm him against the fears and the terrors that beset him now. It was only he who had failed when he had returned from their last parting, only the man in him that had cried out after the beauty of her he had set aside. So near had his failure been, that the faeries had heard the voice of his weakness and nearly had the prophetic words of Mrs. Coyne that night come true.

But now, seeing her once again, would not she who had brought him so dose to the knowledge of truth, bring him strength until he could put the miles of the mountains, the rivers and the winding roads between them?

He strode out fast from his cabin door and his feet were swift and sure down the side of the hills to the moor.

The evening light of primrose was turning to sullen mauve. Across the mountains a summer storm was rolling up the heavy banks of clouds. He had no covering to his head and took no heed of the sudden murmurs of the wind that rose a warning in his ears.

All that his mind was holding now was the thought of the virtue this sight of her once more would bring him. From the window in his cabin, Malachi saw him go and beat his hands upon his head lest evil might befall him.

“May the Holy Mother of God and all the saints be guarding the feet of him now,” he muttered, “and may the Lord God turn his back to destruction through the long hours of the night.”

So, with Malachi’s blessing that never reached his ears, he went seeking the blessing of her he had placed in the holy place of his soul where men enshrine the mother they love and those few women of the world who are beyond reproach.

The clouds were up and about the sky when he came by the mountain footpath into Ballysaggartmore. They wrapped the trees in darkness and all beneath them was a heavy gloom. No rain was falling, but out of the far east came sudden bursts of light that heralded up the rising storm.

It was never his intention that night to speak to Anna Quartermaine, wherefore, there being none about upon the Lismore road, he climbed a low wall and dropped into the garden where he had walked with her before.

A light was burning in the room he knew she sat in and, creeping down the garden path, he came to the very window where it was.

The scent of the flowers, now roses and the lupin tree, was like an incense heavy in the air. He made his way through it as though faintness must come to him before he reached the object that he sought.

A chink in the blind gave him sight within and there she sat, with hands folded in her lap, her eyes half closed, just watching the quiet progress of her thoughts as comes with idle meditation.

Never had he seen her dressed as then, in a soft loose gown with shortened sleeves and hanging silken belt that gently bound her waist around and fell down to her feet.

“How have I dared to love her lessl” he whispered in his breath and the very softness of the line of her bare arm, the shoulders turned towards him and even the faint color of her skin brought him in wonder and amazement to the sense of sacred things, as when a man looks upon a picture of the Mother of God feeding the Infant Christ at her naked breast.

So he had meant to think of her; so he thought of her still and more than ever when he saw her sitting there. She was die embodiment of all the highest that his soul could reach to, just as that faerie in the mountains was the symbol of the overwhelming emotions whereby he was a man.

Then, as he watched her, came all the strength he needed to his soul and he would have had courage to speak with her then, for the fear of himself had gone out of him; but because of the grandness of the room where she sat and the fine clothes that were on her and the string of pearls that was about her bare neck, he did not dare, but stood there in silence with watching eyes looking through the chink in the blind.

It was presently there came a dog barking at him from beyond the house and it stood in the garden some yards from where He was and snarled at him, but he had no fear of it and never took his eyes away from the chink in the blind.

At the sound of the dog barking, she looked up and, as it snarled outside in the darkness, she rose to her feet and crossed the room to the window where he was standing.

And it was as if some spell were cast on him where he stood, for, though he had the wish to hide himself from her then, he could not move. So when she pulled back the blind to look out into the darkness, she saw him standing there and he heard the cry that came out of her lips and thought it was fear at the sudden sight of him.

They were long windows that opened to the ground and when some moments had gone by, she unfastened the catch and held the window wide.

“Anthony Sorel,” she said and the voice with which she spoke was almost below the sound of her breath. But he heard her say his name and knew then how the faerie in the mountains that night had stolen from her even the beauty of her voice, for the sound of it was like a sword thrust into his heart, so that he could only stand there in silence, with no word that he could say and trembling in himself for the pain that it brought him.

CHAPTER XVII

SHE said no more than his name and stood upon one side so that he must see it was her wish for him to come within.

It was as one moving in a dream he obeyed and when he was in the room, she closed the window behind him, then turned, standing there until her eyes had made sure of what she saw.

“Why have you come like this?” she asked at last and came to his side, and waited there until he should answer her. But as yet, he could not speak. His tongue was dead. He could not feel it in his mouth.

She waited, watching the fear and the wonder in his eyes, and when still he did not speak, she laid a hand on his arm, asking again.

He found his voice, but it was not the voice he knew of as his own, for it seemed to be far away in him and the sound of it came to his ears as an echo comes that beats back with its hollow note across the hills.

“I came for the last sight of you,” he said simply, “before I go out of the mountains up there and set out further away into the West.”

She took her hand away from him and stood alone.

“You're leaving your cabin in Knockshunahallion?” she asked.

He bent his head.

“When?”

“To-morrow—as soon as the sun is up.”

“Why?”

With all the longing that was in him to find the full measure of her understanding, he yet felt it impossible to tell her why. Perhaps a consciousness in the luxury of those surroundings made him feel the strangeness of his own life, the different being he was to her, the separate planes in which they moved and the sudden fear, when he found her thus so far from the touch of the Nature with which he lived, that the ideal he had made of her might well not be the woman that she was.

“Can’t you tell me why?” she asked.

He looked long at her then, hardly believing her the same woman he had seen those days upon the open stretches of his mountain land, yet clinging desperately in his heart to the one ideal that he had found in her. For now it was her beauty most of all he saw, the soft transparency of her skin, the color of her lips, the deep and peaceful lights that looked out from her eyes; her hair, its dark, warm color too; even the comb of some green jade that nestled there like a snake in hiding in the earth; even that he saw as well.

He found no blame in her for this, but knew it was the shadow of the spell the faeries had cast deep upon his soul. So he closed his eyes as she stood before him and tried to think alone upon the greater beauty she had brought him first.

“Do you remember the words of Mrs. Coyne?” he asked her presently—“that night when I brought you down the mountains to Gorteeshall?”

“I remember,” she replied.

But though she said she remembered them, he repeated them aloud to her then.

“ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthandin’ to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are crossed and the night comes batterin’ wid the wind across the mountains at yeer little door.”

“I remember them—every word,” she said again.

He opened his eyes now and he looked at her.

“They were true words,” said he. “Didn’t I say as we listened, that she spoke with authority?”

Now again she came dose to his side and then he knew that the perfumes that had come to his senses were not only the scents of the flowers in her garden, but the scent of the perfume she wore upon her body; that without his knowing it, it had entered into the consciousness of his mind and lain there until such time as when the weakness of his spirit was upon him.

She saw the trembling that passed through him as she touched his arm and instinctively her Angers tightened in their hold.

“How have the words come true?” she asked.

Then he told her how the faeries had come to him and of the woman whose beauty was the beauty she had stolen from Anna Quartermaine to bring it there tempting him into the mountains.

“Why tempting you?” she asked.

He took her hand from his arm, needing that fortitude to bear the touch of her. She turned with her eyes always watching him as he went to the window and looked out. What he thought of then, she might perhaps have known, but it was the spoken word she wanted and waited for it from his lips.

And when it seemed he would not utter the spoken word, she would not let him free of it, but asked again.

“Why tempting you?” said she.

“Because I am just a man after all,” he answered. “These years of loneliness have brought me knowledge of the truth but not the power to grasp it. Why do you ask me to explain? The explanation I should give to you might be understood but not by the woman you are to me.”

“What am I to you?” she murmured.

He drew his breath deep for the want of his words.

“The thing only a woman can be,” said he, “to a man only when he loves. It’s so easy a thing to desire—and so hard a thing to love, and isn’t there all the distance between them, that stretches from the highest heaven to the furthest earth?”

She told him she saw no difference and he was marveling at that then, thinking that in the ideal he had made of her, he knew her better than she knew herself.

“Aren’t the two things one,” said she, “woven so close and interwoven that it would go hard for you to know which was which?”

He sat down by die side of her where she was sitting and made for her stories that he knew or had learnt from the people in their cottages and they all said die same thing—that the heart of a man is as fuel in the needs of his body and that desire will bum out love as peat is burnt on die floor of the open grate.

And when he had made an end of his stories, to which she had listened in all silence, she looked at him and held his eyes with her eyes so that she might yet know his answer should he not reply.

And this was what she asked him.

“Do you love me?” she said.

He gave some moments to silence before he answered, but did not hesitate in the steady glance of his eyes.

“Yes—” he said presently and felt the power and virtue of his manhood that he could say it, in the stillness of his heart, without trembling, as he had been trembling those days, or even thinking of the beauty that was in her face as he had thought of it when he saw it in die face of the faerie woman on the hill.

“And you are going away?”

“Right away,” said he, “out into the West where the sounds of the sea are the silences that come into a man’s mind.”

“Aren’t there silences in the mountains surely?” she asked him.

And he shook his head.

“These last still nights, when never a breath has been whispering in the thorn trees and you could hear the water trickling through the moss between the stones, there has been the babel of voices in my ears, so that the silent hills were ringing with the noise of them. Silence, solitude—like love itself— all these things are in the wind. To-night I shall go back into the mountains, having seen you this last time, and through all this storm that will howl about my cabin door, there will be such silence in my soul as I have not heard for many days. Then the voices will be still, for it is you can kill the self in me and all the desires that come in a torment in my sleep.”

And now she asked him was it love of her it Could be, if it took him away from her and put the miles of the roads and the rivers between them.

“Can you love me and leave me too?” she asked.

He reached out for the words that he had, to explain the things that he meant.

“It’s not you I’m leaving,” he cried out to her, “but myself. One more night than this in those mountains and because of the weakness and desire that is in me, the words of Mrs. Coyne would be true. The faeries would take me and never again should I be the man I have been these two years gone and all the hope of the great things that I had would be lost. Didn’t I show you Mary Coyne whose own beauty was the emotion that brought her to the end? Wasn’t it the faeries that came with the lights that she saw and the music that she heard and didn’t they bring the last destruction to her soul? And can’t you see that the Fate of the faeries is upon me as well? By prayer and fasting, by walking this way on the roads and that way on the roads, I have tired the body in me, so that only in dreams has the woman with your beauty that she stole come near to me again. And now to-morrow I shall be gone and all the emotion that overwhelmed me will be put away and I sitting by the rocks that look over the silence of the tempest of the sea.”

“What a wonderful madness it all is,” said she, as though with a light from the far illumination of his mind, for she had for the instant caught sight of the ideal for which he strove.

“And what a wonderful love it will be,” he answered, “when I can love you as I talk to you now and my heart will no longer be the fuel in the furnace of my body.”

She turned away and what moved her she could not think, but she went to the window and stood there looking out into the rushing wind and the lightning that flashed out where no rain seemed promised to assuage the storm.

At last she turned again.

“What does this other woman and her beauty mean to you?” she asked.

“Haven’t I told you,” he replied, “what all faeries mean—that symbol of the emotions by which we are overwhelmed. She is the symbol of my lower self, that cannot love but only knows desire.”

“And with the beauty that you find in me?” said she.

He bent his head.

“Then is not that the way you love me too?”

To which he cried out, “No—” and “No—” and “No” again.

“That is the way I love myself,” he said. “There’s not one word that you could utter or which, as I am, could make me long for you.”

She dropped her hands in a gesture of despair.

“I—I cannot understand,” said she. “It sounds very wonderful, that’s all that I can say. I’ve never thought of love like this in all my life and cannot understand it even now the thought has come to me. Why should this faerie woman with the beauty I have, contain such power in her that as I stand here is denied to me?”

“Some women only have one power,” said he— “the power to make men love themselves. You have the power with me to make me love the spirit that is all of truth and is not mine or any man’s but belongs to the world of men itself. She has the beauty that my eyes have seen in you, that my body needs, that wake all the storms and tumults of emotion in the silence I had gathered in my mind. That is what I am going to leave behind me and only love of you that I take. And if I am or if I’m not the man that you would ever love, time will bring us proof. If I am not, you’ll know that you have been the greatest hope a man has ever striven to secure. And that is love, the thing that makes us know the spirit that we have. I only go, because I must learn the truth that is in me.”

He moved to the window by which she had let him in. But in the sudden fear of losing him, she caught his hand.

“Do you hate the other woman?” she asked.

“No,” said he. “I only hate myself.”

He bent and touched the hand that held him with his lips and before she could stay him, had uncaught the window fastening and was gone.

The black storm of the night took him as a body is sucked down into a whirlpool. For one instant she heard his footsteps on the garden path and then the silence he had spoken of was an emptiness and a pain in her heart

CHAPTER XVIII

ANTHONY SOREL came up into the mountains again by the narrow track across the moors where the peat carts would be going, making their two deep ruts in the soft, mossy earth and beating out a smooth pathway where the hoofs of the horses and the jennets would be falling.

By this way it was passing Crow Hill and Maiachi’s cabin he would be and the storm of the wind was blowing about him with the strength of great waves in a wild sea and sometimes the way before him that was black with the heaviness of the night was lit up by the lightning flashes, and the sound of the thunder was like the rush of the great rocks that sometimes are loosened and would be tumbling down the mountain’s side.

But the noise of the storm, just as he had said, was nothing to him now, for now there was an abounding stillness in the far depths of his mind that no storm of the wind, no thunder or lightning could disturb.

Whether the ideal he had made of Anna Quartermaine was the real woman she was or not, meant nothing to him then; whether the surroundings in which he found her—so distinct and high above his own—had contributed to these lofty and almost unearthly impressions of her, he did not stop to think.

Realities were not in the dealings of his mind. She had inspired him to the greatness of his purpose surely. That sight of her had given him the strength he had desired. He climbed up the mountain path, singing as he went for the courage now that was in him. The dread of the night had passed away in the exaltation that he had. Now he could prove to himself that in the sacrifice of love, there was no belittling emotion of desire and when that was proved would he not have the greatest thing a man can possess to offer her?

At the door of Malachi’s cottage he thought to pass, then knocked, saying to himself it was for the last time and with more truth than ever he could have known.

The old man opened the door and the wind caught it from his hands and flung it wide.

“Is it still walking the roads ye are,” said he, “and ye destroyed surely the way yeer clothes do be hanging and flapping on yeer bones?”

“ ’Tis not destroyed I am,” said Anthony Sorel, “but a new man who can face all the terrors of this night and will be making his way into the West with the morning light of the day.”

“God be wid that day,” said Malachi mournfully, “and may ye get the great name by the songs ye’d be singing when there’ll be but the bare silence of these hills to wake me and I coming to my sleep.”

He held open the door against the wind, but Anthony Sorel would not come within for die need of the sleep that was on him and the weakness it brought “Would I pass your door the last night,” said he, “if the pain of sleep was twice as heavy on my eyes? Would I pass your door and not be telling. you ’twas the strength I had got by me again, the way I’d be going no more into the valley or the townland where my songs would be destroyed and the soul in me become a warped and a little thing?”

“Where did ye come by the power of it now,” asked Malachi, “and ye wid the sweat on yeer face was weak like a young lamb sucking the dead? Where did ye come by the power of it at all?” he inquired.

Anthony Sorel told him where he had been and the strength he had found from the last sight of the woman that he loved.

Before he had finished there was the sound of mirthless, hollow laughter in the old man’s voice. He raised his hands above his head and there he shook them in the air.

“May the Lord God Almighty have the keeping of yeer soul,” said he, “for the sense has gone out of ye and aren’t the wits lost on ye to be doing a mad thing the like of that?”

“What madness is there in the thing I’ve done.?” Anthony Sorel asked.

“Yirra, isn’t that the way all men are mad that do be walking the earth the way ’tis in the power of them to leave a woman be and she drawin’ them wid her eyes could draw the sthones down the mountainsides?”

“Didn’t I tell ye these days gone by, not to be speaking the parting word to herself? And wasn’t it the truth I was saying that her voice would be coming to ye in the fall of the night and she crying out with the want of women for the nature is in them? Glory be to God, have they put the sthroke on ye that yeer wits do be gone with walking the hills and crying out there in yeer cabin for the looks she’d be having in her eyes and the wet touch of her lips?”

He turned away from him as from one that is past all healing, standing by Ins window and rocking himself to and fro.

“I shall be gone to-morrow,” said Anthony Sorel. “Must I be saying it again? To-morrow I shall be gone and all the twists and the turns of the road and the walls of the hills will be between us. ’Tis herself has given me power to be facing this night alone and our parting said and she knowing the way I’d be loving her and never raising a hand to hold me back.”

“Is it raise her hand she would!” exclaimed Malachi sorrowfully. “Is it the hand of a woman ever held a man yet, when the thoughts she puts in him with the look of her eyes and the kisses she has for him on her lips, are things mightier than her hands would be for the holding? Yirra—is it gone he’d be when a man says good-bye to a woman? It is not. D’ye mind me now, for the hours of the night are still before ye and ye sitting alone in the storm in yeer little room and shan’t I be praying God on me two knees bended that the light of the day shall be coming fast till ye’d be gone?”

“She’s said good-bye and she’s let me go,” said Anthony Sorel. “Isn’t that enough? And aren’t I strong to be going and isn’t there power in me I never had these days that are past?”

And then an anger came into him with his pride that was hurt and he cried out that never would Malachi know the virtue of the love that he had or the exaltation that it brought to his soul. And the old man bent his head, saying he was no maker of songs, nor had he the tongue of the poet in his head.

“Maybe ’tis the years that are on me,” said he, “and I dried up and withered with age, could not remember the blood has gone dancing through me veins. For ’tis easy a man would be forgetting the love that he had in the days of his youth when the thorn trees would blossom for the pleasure of his eyes. Shure the madness of love is a great thing, but when yeer heart is dry with the years that are on ye, then ’tis the way the thorn trees would blossom in the want of their seed and divil a bit is it for the pleasure of yeer eyes. Let ye go now, Anthony Sorel, and be taking yeer madness away there up into the hills and when the blossoms fall and the seed-pods do be opening their mouths, let ye seek in yeer heart for the words I’ve said this night, for never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of God do be scattering them east and west in the soft and fruitful corners of the earth. And where would the songs of a man he’d be singing be then when the blossom was gone and the pleasures be dead in the heart of him?”

CHAPTER XIX

THE door of Anthony Sorel’s cabin was rattling in the storm of the wind and it was when he had reached it and his hand was on the latch that the words Malachi had spoken came with the truth that they had into his mind. So it was he stood there without entering as one who listens for the sound of a voice or a movement within. But the voice was in himself and it was the voice of Malachi and over and over again it was saying,

“Never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting from the tree till the seeds be set and the winds of God do be scattering them east and west in the soft and fruitful corners of the earth.”

It was they in their youth were the blossoms of the tree, he meant. It was in them the seeds should be set by the winds of God.

And then again he heard the voice of Malachi and it was saying,

“The madness of love is a great thing, but when your heart is dry with the years that are on ye, then ’tis the way the thorn trees would blossom in the want of their seed and divil a bit is it for the pleasure of yeer eyes.”

He flung the door open wide and went in and seated himself down on the stool in the chimney corner, and set himself, in anger at his thoughts, to the making of his fire that was blade and cold in a bed of white ashes.

Was it the truth? Was it the truth? Was love the deceiving emotion that only conjured before the eyes of youth? Could no woman be the inspiration of the highest beauty and the greatest truth?

The wood he had brought to the grate burnt up into flame and he felt the first warmth of it stealing into his blood.

Surely the tree in its blossoming was a truth in itself—a beauty alone, if the eye would but choose to see it. Not everything was a means to an end. His love of the woman from whom he had parted, that was a thing in itself, a blossom from which no seed need come to complete the beauty and the truth that it was. Weren’t there emotions other than the emotions of Nature that moved in man? Was there not the spirit in him that stood, alone, as he soon would be standing, when the winding of the roads and the length of the rivers would be set between them?

The whole object of his life depended on it that it were so, but just when he thought he had found comfort in that, came the words of Malachi back into his mind until they sung in the air about his head and all his senses were tricked by the sound of them.

He was struggling now to keep back the conscious self in him and every word of Malachi’s that re turned to him, he flung from his mind like a man that is beset on all sides.

“May never a man be parted from a woman,” he cried out aloud, “dll the nature that is in them shall come to its own fulfillment! Is there never a blossom that falls from the tree, but what the seed is already set in the hour of its parting! Is pleasure the only reward that a man desires, and the only gift that Nature has to give him!”

And then the silence came over him, and the warmth of the fire was about him as he sat, and the storm came battering across the mountains at his little door.

It was presently in a despair that he rose from the persecution of his thoughts and set about making a cup of tea for himself and cut a piece of bread from a loaf that was in the house. And when he had eaten the bread and drunk the steaming liquid, he came back to his stool in the corner of the chimney.

“The last night,” he said aloud and looked about him, at the rafters in the thatch, the smoke-colored walls, the bed he had slept on at nights for the two years that had passed and a sadness came over him to think he must be gone from it so soon. For life seemed a thing to be weary of then, and as he thought of the long roads before him to the West and the nights that he must be traveling and all the days when he would be searching for a roof to cover his head, he could have wished to lie down where he was for the fatigue and the sadness that was over him.

Then when he had said that and the thoughts it had brought had passed away from him, he looked back again into the rich heart of the glowing fire. It was warm to the slumber in his eyes and he saw faces there that smiled at him and they were faces of women he had known before the hope came to him of his own mastery.

At first he shut his eyes and tried to hide them from his mind where the sacred image of the woman he loved was lying. The thought of them was sacrilege to be thought of with her. But it was as though their voices were calling him, so that he opened his eyes again. And first one and then another spoke to him with the looks that they had in their eyes and the gentleness of the words they seemed to say with their lips. And he heard their pity for the weariness that was aching in his body, for each one seemed to be saying out of the past: “Lay your head on my breast and sleep and sleep and I will watch your eyes till the morning wakes you.”

These were not thoughts but things that he saw as he sat by the fire and things that he heard as the storm raged across the mountains with beating gusts upon his little door. Often he shut his eyes that he might see no more of them and pressed his hands to his ears that he might hear no more. But his eyes opened and again his hands fell in his lap and he began wishing that the face and the voice of Anna Quartermaine would come in their stead, rather than that he should find comfort in things of the past he had forever put behind him.

It was no sooner that he had wished, than the faces melted in the flames and out of the heart of the fire there rose the face of Anna Quartermaine, and her eyes were more sad than any of the eyes of the women he had just seen and her lips were murmuring softer words than ever they had uttered.

There was a fear that came upon him then, that he had wished for the thing that was evil in him; but now he could no longer close his eyes and his hands were clutched upon his knees so that he could not press them to his ears.

So he tried in his mind not to hear what she said, but her voice in all its gentleness was above the roaring of the storm and the eyes that looked out at him were brighter than the fire itself.

And he heard her say,

“Why do you squander your days in the ceaseless labor of your soul?” and as she spoke, he could not tell whether it was he was thinking the words, or she who spoke them. For after that it seemed that he heard a phrase that came out of the days of his childhood: “Consider the lilies of the field— they toil not, neither do they spin—” and he wondered had she said that of herself, or had he thought it, because of Malachi’s speaking of the blossom on the thorn trees.

But because it had seemed to come out of her voice, he answered aloud in his own and it sounded far away, as if it came on the wings of the storm and had been blown to him across the lonely stretches of the hills till there was nothing human in it that was left.

“What is the life of a man,” he said, “when it ceases from the endless labor of his soul?”

And she answered to him out of the fire,

“The life of a flower that blows in beauty and in beauty droops to the earth and is dead.”

Then he thought it must be the voice of Malachi that was speaking to him still out of her lips and he clung again to the ideal he had of her and his eyes closed with the weight of the slumber and the weakness of resistance that was on him and he swayed on the seat where he sat.

Then the light of the fire and the sight of her face that he saw, went out of his eyes and it was that he knew he was overtaken by sleep. Yet still he could hear the moan of the storm as it rushed across the mountains and still he could see die lightning when it lit up the corners of his room.

And whether it was in a dream or a thing that had happened, he did not know, but it seemed in his sleep that he opened his eyes, when upon the other side of the chimney where he sat, there was an old man whom he knew to be the life that was weary in him. There was in his hands a pack of cards, crumpled and worn and marked with the many hands that had held them and he was counting them through his fingers as one who is waiting to play.

It was when he saw that Anthony Sorel’s eyes were open, that he pulled a chair between them, as though this it was for which he had been waiting and he dealt out the cards from the pack with his hands that were the color of unwashed day.

Then in silence they played—a game of forty-five—and when Anthony Sorel saw the money they played for were the pips out of the core of an apple, then he said aloud as he played: “This is a dream,” for he knew that it was the things Malachi had said of the seeds of the thorn trees that had been fixed in the web of his brain.

And the old man when he had said that answered, “The whole of life is a dream—it is only death is the awakening.”

So they played on and it seemed to Anthony Sorel as he shuffled the cards that at all costs he must not lose the seeds of the apple he had in his hand for that they were dearer to him than gold and though in his consciousness he cared nothing for the wealth of gold, it seemed that gold was power to him then and that the seeds were even dearer than power.

But one by one they were taken from him, for all the luck of the cards came to the old man and there was skill with him too, so that at last there was but one seed left in his hand and he cried out aloud, “If this is lost from me where shall I be?” And the old man dealt the cards and answered, “What are the seeds of life to you?”

At which in the fear of losing, Anthony Sorel threw over the chair that was between them, and the sound of it falling opened his eyes from the sleep that he had, when he saw the chair thrown down at his feet. And the things he had thought were die cards with which they played, were a sheaf of his poems that the wind of the storm had (gathered and scattered about the room.

So he wondered how the wind had come in for the door had been dosed, but when he looked up, the door was open and there on the threshold stood the woman of faerie with the beauty of Anna Quartermaine in her face.

CHAPTER XX

ANTHONY SOREL that was fresh from sleep dosed his eyes because in the moment of waking from his dream, he thought the sight had been deceived in him. But when he opened them again, die woman of the faeries was still there and now the door was closed behind her.

Yet she came no further into the room, but stood there with die distance of the uneven mud floor between them, as if it needed some word from him to give her invitation.

But he could not speak, for the only words in his mind were the words of Mrs. Coyne when she said, “ ’Tis not that sort of wisdom will be sthand-in’ to ye and ye taken by the faeries yeerself where the roads are crossed and the night comes batterin’ with the wind'across the mountains at yeer little door.”

Now the night indeed was battering with the wind across the mountains at his cabin door, and there she stood that was come from the faeries themselves and, like a cloud that is big with rain, he felt the hour to be heavy with the fate that was over him.

“ 'Tis a lonely man ye are this night, Anthony Sorel,” said she at last in the softest accent of her brogue, “and ye goin’ the wild ways of the starvin’ roads when day would be come and the sun setting up in the heavens.”

It brought no wonder to him that she knew he was about to depart. Since that first moment of amazement when she had spoken his name on the hillside, he knew that nothing- was there that could be hid from her.

“Couldn’t you leave me the peace of these hours,” said he mournfully, “when ’tis sleep that I need to be finding the strength of the man that was in me?”

She made a movement to come to the chair he had thrown down in his sleep, and though he cried out to her to be staying where she was nor come nearer one step to him, she took no heed but smiled gently at the fear in his voice and picked up the chair as it lay and seated herself there by the fire.

It was then as he looked at her, that his senses swung in a void where there was no power of his will. For the perfume that had been about Anna Quartermaine was now in his nostrils and her voice continued from the moment of her silence like a soft music that destroyed the truth of all sound in his ears; and as he looked in her face he heard the words of Anna Quartermaine that she had spoken to him out of the fire when she said: “Why do you squander your days in the ceaseless labor of your soul?”

He clenched his hands till the nails were biting of his palms in his effort to regain the balance of his resistance which in that moment had almost gone from him.

“Couldn’t you leave me in peace?” he said again.

“Was there peace in the sleep that ye had?” she replied. “Yirra, wasn’t I sthandin’ at the door and ye moanin’ and cryin’ out like a dog would be lost on the mountain land? And didn’t ye throw down the chair with the fret that was on ye? Shure what rest would ye be getting out of sleep is the like of a tossin’ dream? Isn’t it the sleep of a babe, do be lying in the hook of its mother’s arm, ye’d be wanting? An’ isn’t it cornin’ all these ways over the mountain sthones I’d be, to be bringin’ the sleep to yeer eyes an’ I with no vamps at all an’ me feet cut an’ Weedin’?”

“Wouldn’t I sooner be awake all night,” said he, “than be sleeping so?”

She took no notice of his words and it was as if he had not spoken, for without answering, she lifted one of her bare feet and there was the broken skin and the little trickling streams of blood where the stones had cut against her as she walked.

He followed her eyes with his eyes where she looked and when he saw the pain of the wounds on her ankles and about the soles of her feet, he felt all that pity as he would have felt for a human thing and went to the door that opened at the back of his room and passed out.

She smiled up at him when he came back with a bowl of soft rain-water in his hands and watched him with a look of gratitude in her eyes as he washed her feet of the earth and the blood that was fast upon them. And when he made an end of drying them with a doth he had brought as well, she slipped gently a hand on his head as he knelt at her feet, and drew it down upon the softness of her lap and bending down over him she whispered: “Let ye be 8leepin’ so now and my eyes will be watchin’ ye dll the momin’.”

Then, though he knew they were die words of the voices he had heard out of the fire, and though the soul in him cried out that he was losing sight of the ideal that he had, yet for a time he stayed where he was, thinking, in the weariness of his body, of the peace such sleep would be.

She bent over him presendy to see had the sleep come yet to his aching eyes and when she saw they were open and fixed in a staring wakefulness on the glow of the fire, she whispered again in his ear,

“Why would ye be suffering the pain of a man is wandering the starving land for a bite or a sup while die hunger that is through him would be feeding on his bones? What’s this madness ye have on ye?”

And her voice as she asked him was soft with the voice of women whose nature it is to minister to the needs of men.

He heard that note it was never her thought to conceal and he looked up into her face from where he sat, wondering why he had never consciously known the beauty of Anna Quartermaine so well as he knew it now in this creature of faerie who had stolen the beauty that she had. For whereas in Anna Quartermaine he had allowed only the spirit in him to be stirred by the light of her eyes, the sound of her voice and the beauty of her mind, yet now, with that same beauty before him, it was not the hope in his soul that he thought of, but weariness of his body and the need of his sleep and the sweet danger of the peace that she brought him.

“Why did you walk all these ways on the road and up the paths of the lifting hills to be coming to me the nights when the man that was strong in me had face? Why did the faeries send you this night of all the nights when the man that was strong in me had dropped to the weakness of water would be trickling willy-nilly through the moss?”

She stroked the hair of his head with the lingering motion of her hand, and with every touch of it, he felt the passage of a stream of blood through his veins that was warm and giving him life while it brought him ease of the pains of weariness that he had. '

“Didn’t I know it was beaten and bruised ye were,” she answered, “and ye destroyed shurely by the pains of a man is gone to madness with the need would be in him?”

“And what matter would that be making to you?”

She passed the touch of her hand from his hair to his forehead that was damp with the sweat that was on him. And when he felt the gentleness of her fingers on his skin, he shivered and closed his eyes as it were more than he could bear.

“Isn’t it the matter with all women,” she answered him then, “the way they must be' the cause of all suffering would be in the very heart of them to appease?”

“How did you know there was suffering in me?”

“Didn’t I see ye,” said she, “and ye walkin’ the hills and didn’t I know the fear of yeer heart that was on ye and ye talkin’ and keepin’ the distance of me that night? Will ye lay yeer head down now while my hands would be sthrokin’ ye, for isn’t it the want of the sleep is killin’ ye entirely?”

He could not think whether it were obedience or not, but laid his head down once more in her lap and wished it were near to the hour of the morning for the powerlessness that had come over him. Yet as he lay there and she stroked his forehead with her hand, he could not close his eyes, but was wondering what Anna Quartermaine would think of all die fine words of his parting, if she could see him then.

At last and at the very moment she was smiling because she believed the sleep had come to him, he leapt to his feet from her lap where he lay and shook off from him all the sensations of the touch of her hand. For now he could no longer bear the accusation of the thoughts that beset him and a wild strength had come to his soul, as when a man fights fiercely at the very moment of his defeat or a candle shoots up the highest flame as it gutters and dies out.

“This night—only this night,” he cried out, “there was I saying the parting word to the woman I love and what is this madness of ease has come over me now and what would she say of me to be playing with the danger that I am I”

“If ’tis the woman is in her at all,” she answered him, “is it plaguing herself she’d be and ye takin’ ease from one has her own beauty stolen on her? Wouldn’t she liefer see ye sitting down in this place with one had the looks of her and ye thinkin’ maybe ’twas her own lap had been nursin’ ye, than traipsing the hills and contriving the way ye’d forget the sight of her? If ’tis a woman she is, wouldn’t she rather be romancin’ that way with herself than not at all? Sit down here on the floor at my feet and let ye stretch out now for yeer sleep that has been these long days coming to ye and is behind ye yet.”

If it was pity and consolation she had in her voice, he took none of them from the words that she said, but called upon the name of God to his witness that the woman he loved had kept him alone in those days to the trembling purpose of his ideal.

“Wouldn’t she despise me now for the poor weak thing that I am,” said he bitterly, “and she, down there in the valley, thinking I’d be fighting alone the battle that’s in me!”

She rose quietly to her feet and he trembled but did not move away as she came near to him.

“If ’tis not afraid of her beauty ye are, the way ye can say the parting word when ye’re with her, why would ye be afraid of her beauty in me?”

“ ’Tis not her beauty I’m afraid of now,” he answered, “but the fear is of myself. You are the thing in me that brings the fear into my heart. It’s not her beauty that you symbolize in the body that you have, but my own fear of myself and the emotions and desires that are overwhelming me. While I am with her, her beauty is nothing. I should not miss it to-morrow if it were gone, for the age of the years might.rob her of it and beauty would still be in her mind for me to love. But when I am come away, then the passion that is in me brings her beauty close to my eyes. I grow frightened of the thing that I am and the desires that beset me. It is only then, when my emotions are upon me and I grow weak to resist, that my eyes see you, in the living form of the beauty that she has.”

“ ’Tis the worst that I’d be in ye so?” said she sadly.

He bent his head.

“But shure isn’t every woman the good and the bad in a man?” she went on. “And might I not be the spirit of herself would be seekin’ the best and the worst in ye, the way no other woman would be cornin’ die ways of the roads and be stealin’ a part of the whole man that she loved?”

He put his hand to his eyes, for the softness of her voice was becoming the sounds of music that floated about in the air above his head and came between the throbs of his senses and the power of his will. Then he knew how the strength he had gathered was fast going out of him and he put out his hands touching her arms, because he knew that in the warmth of them there was the forgetfulness of sleep to be found.

Sa she stood there quietly, in a passive obedience to his touch, and only put back her head that when he opened his eyes he might see all the willingness of the beauty that was in her face.

But it was as if he knew and was afraid to look at her. For then he summoned the faltering power of his will; his lingers tightened upon her arms and slowly and blindly he led her to the door and unfastened the latch.

"Where are we going?" she whispered.

" ’Tis you are going," he answered, “to the shadows of the hills and the mists that drive over the mountains from which you came."

“Is it putting me out in the storm again?" she murmured, “and I with the bare feet on me would be cut and bleeding with the sthones?"

“The roads of the wind will be easier walking than the mountain paths," said he. “Don’t I know 'twas to soften the heart in me you came with the wet blood on your feet? Let you go by the roads of the wind and leave me to the torment of my soul alone."

She took his hand from the latch and fastened it back and her arms came about his neck when she saw that he meant them to be parted.

“Ye won’t let me be goin’ this night,” she cried softly in his ear. “Aren’t there all the black hours till morning and wouldn’t ye be walkin’ the floor for the madness that’s in ye and never shutting yeer eyes in sleep?”

In the last effort of his will and the purpose that was flickering in him he raised his voice.

“For the sake of God, will ye go!” he cried.

But she dung to him doser and her hands were now upon his face and her fingers were touching his eyes. And the strength then went out from him like water rushing and for the first moment since they were standing by the door, he opened his eyes and looked at her.

The light of the fire was catching the line of her cheeks. He saw her lips were parted as she breathed and the whole air about them was full of the sounds as of a furnace that roared in his ears. Then he gave up the purpose of his soul and she took him in her arms and kissed the trembling thing that he was.

So had the words of Mrs. Coyne come to the truth, for the night was battering with the wind across the mountains at his little door when Anthony Sorel lost all the wisdom that had stood to him and was taken by the faeries in Knockshunahallion.

CHAPTER XXI

THE storm had beaten itself out and purged the heavens of their clouds of rain, die sun was mounted high in a sky of blue when Anthony Sorel awoke and saw the beauty of the face that was lying beside his upon the pillow.

He had slept indeed without the torment of his dreams and with the peacefulness of rest that comes to the sleep of a child. And now that strength had returned to him, he was left in all the bitter contemplation of remorse.

There were those he had heard of in the mountains whom the faeries had taken, who after some years came back—witless creatures with wild and staring eyes—to the people and the relations of their former life. Was he to become now one of these? Had all hope of the purpose of his soul been destroyed in him? Was he to wander, as with those creatures the faeries had stolen, over the untrodden mountain paths, begging here a crust of bread and there a cup of water, until the spell of his own emotions had been taken from him and he was a free man once more?

Yet what would that freedom mean when once it had come back to him? After those years, he too would be lost in his wits, the songs that he had sung would all be dead in him and the children in the cottages and the farms would fling their laughter at him in derision as he went by.

One hope only he clung to, the thought that there still lived in the valley the woman of his ideal, with the strength of whose inspiration he yet might cast away the spell of these emotions that had fallen upon him.

The faeries indeed had put the stroke of their hand upon him and he knew the mark of it would be there, in the fear of his eyes and the dejection of his heart, for many of the long days that were yet to come. But there was nothing, not even in the power of their mystic hands, that could take from him the ideal he still was clinging to and, stepping silently from the bed where he lay, he crept across the floor to the light of his window and looked out upon the glory of the rising sun.

There was the hope for him, a glory of the God in Heaven that surely rose day by day to lift up the light of the earth. He clasped his hands and almost his thoughts became a prayer as he clung to the assurance that it brought him.

It was only because of himself that he had fallen into the power of their hands. Now that strength had come bade to him with the peacefulness of his sleep, his emotions no longer beset him and though he well knew that in those two years he had achieved no mastery over them, there was yet the ideal that he had, undimmed before his eyes.

He permitted the name of Anna Quartermaine in a whisper to pass his lips and it brought no shame of the love that he had for her, only the shame of his own weakness which in the greatness of her heart he knew she would one day forgive.

So it was, when hope had risen up above the bitterness of shame and remorse in his heart, he turned from the window and set about the gathering together of his things, the crucifix on the chimney wall and the few things that he treasured, for the journey upon the roads that he was going to make that day.

For some time as he moved about the room, he heard only the gentle sounds of her sleeping on the bed, the soft and indrawn breath between her parted lips.

Presently, to a noise that he made, she turned and sighed like a child in the happiness of its contentment. He crossed to the bed and looked down at her, thinking she was to wake and making ready to tell her how soon he would be gone. But the depth of her sleep was still with her. And then as he stood there, his thoughts brought him back to the night when first he had seen her face through the pane of Malachi’s window, of the way he had asked her to unloose the kerchief from her head and how she had bid him unfasten the knot himself and how he had feared then to touch her.

Now, was it only curiosity or again the return of those emotions that he feared, for the longing came over him to untie the knot there as she slept.

All her hair and the lines of her face were concealed by the kerchief that bound her head about. Her eyes and her lips were the eyes and the lips of Anna Quartermaine, and he knew that the likeness of them was the spell cast over him in the imagination of his mind.

Would that spell be gone and that likeness vanish when once the kerchief was removed?

With gentle and silent lingers, he softly unfastened the knot and laid the ends of the kerchief back upon the pillow and there was her hair and all the shape of her face as she slept, uncovered for his eyes to see.

He stared and stared again and the cry that came up to his lips was never uttered.

It was Anna Quartermaine! For not only was the likeness complete in every way, beyond all power of his imagination, but there in the warm strands of her hair was the comb of jade her lingers had forgotten in their speed the night before to take away.

It was Anna Quartermaine! And all the ideal he had clung to was broken in a thousand pieces at his feet “Never to my knowing do the blossoms be parting from the trees till the seeds be set and the winds of God do be scattering them east and west in the fruitful corners of the earth.”

These were the words of Malachi come home to him now. The madness of love was a great thing, but the thorn trees only blossomed in the want of their seed and all the reward that a man might ask was the gift of pleasure that nature had to give him.

She had destroyed the ideal that was in him. He could never believe in life or in love or in himself again.

And then he trembled and swayed from the balance of his mind. It was death he saw then—the death and the end of all things, and his breath was fast between his lips as he sought for die means to find it.

A knife was lying on the table under the window’s ledge, the knife he had used for his bread the night before. It was this he took in his hand and scarcely knew it was there.

Death he asked for, which the old man in his dreams had said was the awakening of life. In the madness that had come upon him, he thought that no man could do otherwise.

And so he brought the knife in his hand and stood looking at her as she lay asleep on his bed. There was no thought of hesitation in his mind. He lifted his arm and thanked God as he struck that the strength was left in him for the striking.

She quivered, as the knife quivered in her breast. No sound did she make as her eyes opened, and there were the countless questions that flew from her eyes to his before they closed again and were shut in a heavier slumber than that of sleep.

CHAPTER XXII

TO mAy mind, this is where ends the story of Anthony Sorel and Anna Quartermaine.

In such a tale of faerie as this, the ugliness of the things that happened after that night of Anthony Sorel’s pitiless realization in those Irish mountains, has but little place.

I know and have already told how he carried the body of Anna Quartermaine out into the heather and laid her there on her last bed with the knife still sunken in her breast. I have no doubt there was in his mind the last tenderness for her thus. He had no wish to hide his deed but would not have them find her on the bed he brought her from.

For none of the essential part of this story I have written came to be known at the trial in the courthouse of the city of Cork. This was the tale and its secret that Malachi told me and after he had come to the death of Anna Quartermaine, his voice and the flow of his words came as it were like a faintly trickling stream that has spent itself in flood and has but a dim echo of the torrent that it was.

He spoke again indeed with Anthony Sorel as he sat alone waiting for that justice which could never judge him, by the lake near the summit of Knockshunahallion. But what they said of this strange crime of passion, that I shall never know, for here it was that Malachi became almost incoherent in his story and the words fell weakly and broken from his lips.

Of the trial itself, which I have read in detail in the Cork papers of that day, nothing in keeping with this story could be written. Already I have told how he kept his silence throughout all the trial. Except for those few poignant words: “They are mad who look for justice, as those who would hunt for a shilling under a stone.”

And that he was hanged for his crime in the jail in Cork, you, who have begun this story at its beginning and followed it patiently until the end, will know.

It has been impossible to re-tell it all in the exact words of that old man Malachi, as he told it to me. The poetic similes he used, the quaint turns of speech, the words that would have been strange to so many would have become bewildering in transcription.

I have tried, and I fear with but ill success, to catch the note of his speech as, hearing one of the thousand sounds in Nature, you try to find its corresponding note upon the strings of some musical instrument.

If I have succeeded in the ears of some, I shall feel I have not tried in vain to make a living thing out of this tale of faerie which, to those who never heard the secret of it from that old man’s lips, has been all now the passionate crime of Anthony Sorel.

ENDNOTES

Endnote 1: As Malachi described her to me, recounting this moment of his story: “She stood there eyein’ him, with the wind tossin’ her hair, and her two feet like stones on the mountain, the way the blood was drawn out cold in them, an’ she countin’ the leaps of her heart like one countin’ their beads in the fear of death.”—E. T. T.

Endnote 2: This was the only occasion in all his narrative when the old man showed me in so many words how deep was his affection and admiration for Anthony Sorel. E. T. T.