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"Young lad, what is this you have done to my fine young daughter?"

"I have done nothing, Bhean 'i Dolain," young Shane flared up, "save in honor, and the man or woman who says other lies."

"Agra, I know that. I know there's no harm in you from head to foot. And the trouble you 've put on her is in her heart. All day long she sighs, and is listless as a shaded plant that does be needing the sun. All night long she keeps awake, and the wee silent tears come down her face. And before my eyes she's failing, and her step that was once light now drags the like of a cripple's. Young lad of the North, you 've put love in the heart of her and sorrow in the mind." "I'm not so sprightly in the mind myself, woman Dolan."

"I know, avick. I know. Is n't it myself that 's suffered the seven pangs of love and I a young girl? But it's easy on a man, avick. He can go into the foreign countries, and put it out of his mind, or take to the drink and numb the great pain. But for a woman it 's different. It's the like of a disfiguration that all can see. And And when you 're gone away, sure all will remember, for men do be minding long. The marrying time will come, and they'll look at my grand young daughter, strong farmer, and merchant of the shop, and drover does be going to England for the cattle-fairs, and they'll say: 'Is n't that the red girl gave love to the sailing fellow, and

"And what would you have me do, woman of the house?"

"What would any decent man do but marry her?"

"Ay!.. Ay! I thought of marrying her, if she'd have me But we hardly know each other yet ... and maybe I'm too young..

"If you 're able to handle a ship, you 're able to handle a woman, young lad. And what time is better for marriage nor the first flush of youth? Sure you grow together like the leaves upon the tree. Let you not be putting if off now, but spring like a hero."

"But is n't the matter of her faith between us, woman of the house?" "And sure that can be fixed later. Will the priest mind, do you think, so long as she does her duty? And a sixpence in the plate on Sunday is better nor a brown ha'penny, and a half-sovereign at Easter will soothe black anger like healing grass. Very open in the thought I am, and I knowing the seven pangs of love. Let you go to your own clergyman, and she 'll go with you, I'll warrant, so eaten is she by love."

"My people, woman o' the house-"

"Your people, is it? Sure it is n't your people is marrying my grand young daughter, but you yourself. The old are crabbit, and they do be thinking more of draining a field, or of the price of flax, nor of the pain and delights of love. And it 's always objections. But there can be no objecting when the job's finished."

She looked at him shrewdly.

"A grand influence, a grand steadying influence is marriage on a sailing

man. It keeps you from spending your money in foreign ports, where you only buy trickery for your silver. And when you have a wife at home, you'll have little truck with fancy women, who have husbands behind the screen, sometimes, and them with knives So I've heard tell Or maybe get an evil sickness. Listen to an old woman has wisdom, bold lad."

"When I come from my voyage . . ." "Dark lad, if anything happens to you, and you drowning in the black water, the great regret that will be on you and the water gurgling into your lungs, and, 'Was n't I the fool of the world,' you'll say, 'that might have heard the crickets singing in the nighttime and my white love by my side? And might have had a power of kissing and lovemaking, but was young and foolish, and lay by my lee lone .

"My ship sails day after to-morrow." She saw surrender in his face, rose quickly, and went to the door.

"Come inside, Moyra, Moyreen! And be putting your cloak on, with the ribbons that tie beneath your chin. And your dress of muslin that the lady in Newry gave you. And stockings. And your shoes of leather. And I'll be putting on my Paisley shawl. And this young boy will be getting Michael Doyle's horse and trap. Come in, Moyreen, come in and put

haste on you, for it 's going to Dundalk we are, this day, this hour, this minute even!"

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It occurred to him as he sat in the haggard under the riding moon, not a pitch shot from the house where his wife was being waked, that nothing was disturbed because she was dead. It was not strange that the stars kept on their courses, for the death of neither king nor cardinal nor the wreck of the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas would move them from their grave accustomed orbit. But not a robin in the hedge was disturbed, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. Nature never put off her impenetrable mask. Or did she really not care? And was a human soul less to her than a worm in the soil?

There was a stir in the house. They would be making tea now for the men and women who said they were The querulous voice of his wife's mother came to him as some led her from the heated house into the coolth of the June night.

mourners

"Great sacrifices we made for him, myself and the white love that 's stretched beyond in the room. All we had we gave him, and all she found was barren death, and I the barren charity of Northern men

"Oh, sure, 't is the pity of the world. you are, Pegeen," a neighbor comforted her.

"On his bended knees he came to her, asking for love," the cailleach went on. "On his bare and bended knees. And her heart melted toward him as the snow melts on the hills. 'And had n't you better wait,' said I, 'Moyreen Roe? With the great looks

and the grand carriage of you, 't is a great match you can make surely. A gentleman from England, maybe, would have a castle and fine lands, or the pick of the dealing men, and they going from Belfast to Drogheda and stopping overnight at Ardee. Or would n't it be better for you to marry one of your own kind, would go to church with you in a kindly way?'

"But if I don't marry this lad, he 'll kill himself,' she says to me.

"But your faith,' says I, 'avourneen, your holy faith, surely you will not be forsaking that for this boy!'"

"And what did she say to that, Pegeen?" the neighbor asked.

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'Sure it 's promised to turn he has,' she answered. 'And do everything is right by me, so much I love him!" "

"The treacherous Ulster hound!" The neighbor inveighed.

"Treacherous by race and treacherous by nature. Sure, can't you see it, the way he treats me? Sorrow word he has for me, that bore the wife of his bosom, barring, ‘Alan Donn Campbell will see you and fix up everything.' And have n't I met Alan Campbell once before, and it 's the cold eye he has and the hard heart. And this is all the return I get for bearing the white darling would be fit mate for a king. There was a publican of Dundalk had an eye on her, a big redfaced, hearty man. And she might have married him but this lad came and spoiled everything. And if she 'd married him, I'd have been sitting in the parlor of the public house, in a seemly black dress and a brooch in the bosom of it, taking my pinch of snuff and my strong cup of tea with a drop of Hollands in it would warm the cockles of your heart, and listening to the conversation of the fine customers

and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould grannies would have curtsied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my kind, so that it 's a knife they 'd put in you, or poison in your tea-"

"Let you be coming in now, Pegeen. Let you be coming in now. And take a cup of tea would put heart in you, or something strong, maybe. And then we 'll be saying a prayer for her who 's gone"

"Dead she is, the poor heart, dead she is, and better off nor I am—

Her high querulousness died away as she went into the house, and again was the silence of the riding moon. All her grief, all her lies, all her bitterness had not stirred a leaf upon the bough. Not a robin in the hedge was disturbed by her calamity, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. .

$9

He thought to himself: had they rushed him into this marriage? And he answered himself truthfully, they had not. He could have said no, and stood by his no, young as he was, against every old woman and every young woman in the world. No, fast as they had worked, they had n't worked faster than his thought had.

And did he marry because he was in love with Moyra Dolan? He was in love with her, he conceded that. For what the term was accepted at, he was in love with her. Women he had met in his twenty years, great ladies of the Ulster clans; shy, starched misses from the Friends' School; moody peasant girls; merry women of the

foreign ports, and to none of them had he felt that strange yearning he had felt toward Moyra Dolan, the strange pull that sends the twig in the diviner's hands down toward the hidden water. Yes, he was in love with her, but was it because of that he had married her? And he truthfully answered, no.

He remembered, the mood coming back to him as concretely as an action, what he had thought while the old woman had wheedled him with her voice like butter. All he had thought in his prentice days at sea, all he had thought of in the night watches, all he had thought of in the loneliness of his mother's house, had gathered like great cloud-banks at night, and had suddenly taken form and color and purpose in that one moment, as a cloud-bank at the coming of the sun Life had appeared to him in one brief moment, and he had tried to grasp it.

It had seemed to him right that he would go down to the sea in ships all his days, and trade in foreign ports, and work, transmuting effort into gain, and should come home to rest.

And for whom was the gain? And where was home? Surely not for himself was the gain, and home was not his cold mother's house? And now that he had come to manhood as boys come at sea, braving danger and thinking mightily, it was for him to decide.

A mirage, a seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a cobbled yard clean as a

his cabin after his watch, into the heeling room where the lamp swung overhead like a crazy thing, and all was a litter of oilskins and sea-boots, and a great dampness everywhere, he would know there was a swept cottage in Louth where the delft shone on the dresser in the kindly light of the turf, and there would be a spinning-wheel in the corner, and big rush-bottomed chairs, and the kettle singing on the hob And when his comrades would leave the ship in port of nights to go to the houses where music and dancing were, and crazy drinking, and where the adroit foreign women held out their arms of mystery and mercenary romance, he would lean over the taffrail and laugh and shake his head: "No, I think I'll stay on board." "Come on, young Shane. There's a woman down at Mother Parkinson's, and they say she's an Austrian archduchess who has run away with a man, and got left. Come on." Or, "There's a big dance over on the beach to-night, and a keg of rum, and the native women. Jump in." "No, I think I'll stay on board and

read." "Come on. Don't be a fool." "No, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. I'll stay on board." And there would be the plash of oars as they rowed shoreward, and maybe a song raised And he would make himself comfortable under the awning of the after deck, and read the bundles of newspapers from home, of how Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish preacher, was dead, or how a new great singer had been heard in London, a Swedish girl, her name was Jenny Lind, or how Shakspere's house had been bought and a great price paid for it, three thousand pounds Or he would read one of the new books that were coming out in a flood, a new one by Mr. Dickens, the bite of the new writer, Mr. Thackeray with his "Vanity Fair," or that strange book written by a woman, "Wuthering Heights." ... But in a little minute the volume would fall to his knees, and the people of the book would leave the platform of his mind, and a real, warmer presence come to it He could see the gracious, kindly womanhood now move through the house, now come to the door to watch the far horizon Of evenings

she would stand dreaming at the lintel while he was leaning dreaming over the taffrail, and though there were ten thousand miles between them, their hearts would be intimate as pigeons And he would think of coming home to the peaceful cottage and the wife with the grave eyes and kindly smile, and if he were a day ahead of time, she would forget her reserve in great joy, and low, pleased laughter would jet from her throat And if he were on time, there would be the quiet grave confidence: "I knew your step!" And if he were

late, there would be the passing of the cloud from the brows: cloud from the brows: "Thank God!

I-I was just a trifle worried!". . And the greetings over, she would look at him with a smile and a little lift of the eyebrows, and he would give her what he had brought from the voyage: a ring from Amsterdam, maybe, where the great jewelers are, or heavy silken stockings of France; or had he gone to the West Indies, a great necklet of red coral; or some fancy in humming-birds' feathers from the Brazils; lace from Porto Rico, that the colored women make with their slim brown fingers; things of hammered brass from India; and were he to China in the tea-trade, a coat such as a mandarin's lady would wear And with each gift there would be a gasp of incredulous surprise, and "Oh, Shaneen, you should n't have!". And then the evening would come, and they would stand on the threshold, and he would listen to the sounds the seamen never hear: the swish and ripple of the wind among the trees, the birds settling themselves to sleep amid the boughs, the bittern that boomed like a horn, and the barking of a distant dog, and the crickets that do be singing when the evening falls And he would turn from that, to find her arms out and her lips apart, who could wait no longer, and together they would go into their house, where the red turf had turned to yellowtogether, over their own threshold, into their own house And when the time came for him to go to sea again, she would be grave with unshed tears and a brave smile And one day after a long voyage, when she had greeted him, she would say, "Some one has come to our house!" and he would n't understand, and be