He rose up from the grass and walked over to the stream and dipped his hands into it, splashing the water on to the grass beside him. The sunlight shone on his hand and made the wet hairs shine like golden threads....

5

He was kneeling there at the side of the stream, looking at the wet glow of his hand when the fear of death came to him, and instantly he was terrified when he thought that he might die. The consciousness of life was in him and the desire to continue and to experience and to know were quickening and increasing. It seemed to him then that if he were to die at that moment, he would have been cheated of his inheritance, that he would have a grievance against God for all eternity.... He moved away from the brook and sank back into the grass, shaken and disconcerted. Until that moment, he had never thought of death except as a vague, inevitable thing that came to all creatures some time ... generally when they were old and had lost the savour of life. He had never seen a dead man or woman and he was unfamiliar with the rites of burial. He knew, indeed, that people die before they grow old, that children die, but until that moment, death had not become a personal thing, a thing that might descend on him....

He shut his eyes and tried to dose the thought of death out of his mind, but it would not go away. He began to sing disconnected staves of songs in the hope that he would forget that he was mortal.... There was a song that Bridget Fallon had taught him when he was a child, and now after many years, he was singing it again:

There were three lords came out of Spain, They came to court my daughter Jane. My daughter Jane, she is too young, And cannot bear your flatt'ring tongue. So fare you well, make no delay, But come again another day....

But the thought of death still lay heavy on his mind, and so he got up and left the field and hurried along the road that led to Hamilton's farm.

"Oh, my God," he cried to himself, "if I were to die now, just when I'm beginning to know things!..."

He began to run, as if he would run away from his own thoughts. The torn strips of clouds, that had looked like molten gold, were now darkening, and their darkness seemed ominous to him. The steepness of the "loanie" made him pant and presently he slackened his pace and slowed-down to walking. His eyes felt hot and stiff in their sockets and when he put his hand on his forehead, he felt that it was wet with sweat.

"I'm frightened," he said to himself. "Scared!..."

He wiped his forehead and then crumpled his handkerchief in his hot palms.

"I'm rattled," he went on to himself. "That's what I am. Oh, my God, I am scared!..."

He looked about him helplessly. He could see a man tossing hay in a field near by, and he watched the rhythmical movement of his fork as it rose and fell.

"I couldn't die now," he thought. "I couldn't. It wouldn't be fair. I wouldn't let myself die ... I wouldn't!"

And as suddenly as the fear of death had fallen on him, it left him.

"Good Lord!" he said aloud, "what an ass I am!"

6

Sheila was sitting on a stool in front of the door. Her uncle had gone to bed, and her aunt, tired after her day's work and her attendance on the sick man, was lying on the sofa, dosing.

"I wondered were you comin'," Sheila said as he came up to her.

"You knew I'd come," he answered.

"I didn't know anything of the sort," she exclaimed, getting up from the stool. "Fellas has disappointed me before this."

"Have you had other sweethearts?" he asked, frowning.

She laughed at him. "I've had boys since I was that high," she replied, holding out her hand to indicate her height when she first had a sweetheart. "What are you lookin' so sore about? D'ye think no one never looked at me 'til you came along? For dear sake!"

She rallied him. Was she the first girl he had ever loved? Was she? Ah, he was afraid to answer. As if she did not know! Of course, she was not the first, and dear knows she might not be the last....

"I'll never love any one but you, Sheila!..."

"Wheesht will you, or my aunt'll hear you!"

"I don't care who hears me!..."

"Well, I do then. Come on down the loanie a piece, an' you can say what you like. I love the way you talk ... you've got the quare nice English accent!"

He followed her across the farmyard and through the gate into the "loanie."

"My father wouldn't like to hear you saying that," he said.

"Why?" she asked. "Does he not like the English way of talkin'?"

"Indeed, he does not. He loves the way you talk, the way all the Ulster people talk!..."

"What! Broad an' coarse like me?" she interrupted.

Henry nodded his head. "He doesn't think it's coarse," he said. "He thinks it's fine!"

Sheila pondered on this for a few moments. "He must be a quare man, your da!" she said.

They walked to the foot of the "loanie" and then turned along the Ballymena road.

"Does he know you come out with me?" she said.

"Who?" he answered.

"Your da."

"No. You see!..." He did not know what to say. It had not occurred to him to talk about Sheila to his father, and he realised now that if it had, he probably would not have done so.

"But if you're goin' to marry me?..." Sheila was saying.

"Oh, of course," he replied. "Of course, I shall have to tell him about you, won't I? I just didn't think of it.... Then you're going to marry me, Sheila?" he demanded, turning to her quickly.

"Och, I don't know," she answered. "I'm too young to be married yet, an' you're younger nor me, an' mebbe we'd change our minds, an' anyway there's a quare differs atween us."

"What difference is there between us?" he said, indignantly.

"Aw, there's a quare deal of differs," she maintained. "A quare deal. You're a quality-man!..."

"As if that matters," he interrupted.

"It matters a quare lot," she said.

They sat down on a bank by the roadside and he took hold of her hand and pressed it, and then he put his arm about her and drew her head down on to his shoulder.

"Somebody'll see you," she whispered.

"There's no one in sight," he replied.

"Do you love me an awful lot?" she asked, looking up at him.

"You know I do."

"More nor anybody in the world?"

He bent over and kissed her. "More than anybody in the world," he answered.

"You're not just lettin' on?" she continued.

"Letting on!"

"Aye. Makin' out you love me, an' you on'y passin' the time, divertin' yourself?"

He was angry with her. How could she imagine that he would pretend to love her?...

"I do love you," he insisted, "and I'll always love you. I feel that ... that!..."

He fumbled for words to express his love for her, but could not find any.

"Ah, well," she said, "it doesn't matter whether you're pretendin' or not. I'm quaren happy anyway!"

She struggled out of his embrace and put her arms round his neck and kissed him. She remained thus with her arms round him and her face close to his, gazing into his eyes as if she were searching for something....

"What are you thinkin', Sheila?" he asked.

"Nothin'," she said, and she drew him to her and kissed him again.

"I wish I was older," he exclaimed presently.

"Why?"

"Because I could marry you, then, and we'd go away and see all the places in the world...."

"I'd rather go to Portrush for my honeymoon," she said. "I went there for a trip once!"

"We'd go to Portrush too. We'd go to all the places. I'd take you to England and Scotland and Wales, and then we'd go to France and Spain and Italy and Africa and India and all the places."

"I'd be quaren tired goin' to all them places," she murmured.

"And then when we'd seen everything, we'd come back to Ireland and start a farm...."

She sat up and smiled at him. "An' keep cows an' horses," she said.

"Yes, and pigs and sheep and hens and ... all the things they have. Ducks and things!"

"I'd love that," she said, delighted.

"We'd go up to Belfast every now and then, and look at the shops and buy things!...."

"An' go to the theatre an' have our tea at an eatin'-house?"

"We'd go to an hotel for our tea," he said.

"Oh, no, I'd be near afeard of them places. I wasn't reared up to that sort of place, an' I wouldn't know what to do, an' all the people lookin' at me, an' the waiters watchin' every bite you put in your mouth, 'til you'd near think they'd grudged you your food!"

They made plans over which they laughed, and they mocked each other, teasing and pretending to anger, and he pulled her hair and kissed her, and she slapped his cheeks and kissed him.

"I'd give the world," she said, "to have my photograph took in a low-neck dress. Abernethy does them grand!..." She stopped suddenly and turned her head slightly from him in a listening attitude.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Wheesht!" she replied, and then added, "D'ye hear anything?"

He listened for a moment or two, and then said, "Yes, it sounds like a horse gallopin'...." They listened again, and then she proceeded. "You'd near think it was runnin' away," she said.

The sound of hooves rapidly beating the ground and the noise of quickly-revolving wheels came nearer.

"It is runnin' away," she said, getting up from the bank and moving into the middle of the road where she stood looking in the direction from which the sound came.

"Don't stand in the road," Henry shouted to her. "You might get hurt."

She did not move nor did she appear to hear what he was saying. He had a strange sensation of shrinking, a desire not to be there, but he subdued it and went to join her in the middle of the road.

"Here it is," she said, turning to him and pointing to where the road made a sudden swerve.

He looked and saw a galloping horse, head down, coming rapidly towards them. There was a light cart behind it, bumping and swaying so that it seemed likely to be overturned, but there was no driver. It was still some way off, and he had time to think that he ought to stop the frightened animal. If it were allowed to go on, it might kill some one in the village. There would be children playing about in the street....

"I'll stop it," he said to himself, and half-consciously he buttoned his coat.

He tried to remember just what he ought to do. William Henry Matier had told, him not to stand right in front of a runaway horse, but to move to the side so that he could run with it. He would do that, and then he would spring at its head and haul the reins so tightly that the bit would slip back into the horse's mouth.... He moved from the middle of the road, and was conscious that Sheila had moved, too. His breath was coming quickly, and he felt again that sense of shrinking, that curious desire to run away. He saw a wheel of the cart lurch up as it passed over a stone in the road, and instantly panic seized him. "My God," he thought, "if that had been me!... He saw himself flung to the ground by the maddened horse and the wheel passing over his body, crunching his flesh and bones. He had the sensation of blood gushing from his mouth, and for a moment or two he felt as if he had actually suffered the physical shock of being broken beneath the cart wheel....

"I can't!" he muttered, and then he turned and ran swiftly to the side of the road and climbed on to the bank, struggling to break through the thorn hedge at the top of it. His hands were torn and bleeding and once he slipped and fell forward and his face was scratched by the thorns....

7

He had thrown himself over the hedge and had lain there, with his eyes closed, trembling. He was crying now, not with fright, but with remorse. He had failed in courage, and perhaps the horse had dashed into the village and killed a child.... He wondered what Sheila would say, and then he started up, his eyes wide with horror, thinking that perhaps Sheila had been killed. He climbed up the bank, and jumped over the low hedge into the roadway. There were some men approaching him, coming from the direction in which the horse had come, but he did not pay any heed to them. He began to run towards the village. A little distance from the place where he and Sheila had stood to watch the oncoming animal, the road made another bend, and when he had reached this bend, he met Sheila.

"You needn't hurry now," she said.

He did not hear the emphasis she laid on the word "now." "Are you all right?" he asked anxiously.

She did not answer, but strode on past him.

"Are you all right?" he repeated, following after her.

"It's a bit late to ask that," she said, turning and facing him. "I might 'a' been killed for all you cared, so long as you were safe yourself!"

He shrank back from her, unable to answer, and the men came up, before she could say anything else to him.

"Did ye see the horse runnin' away?" one of them said to her.

"You'll find it down the road a piece," she replied. "It's leg's broke. It tum'led an' fell. Yous'll have to shoot it, I s'pose!"

They supposed they would. The driver had been drinking and in his drunkenness he had thrashed the poor beast. ... "But he'll never thrash another horse, the same lad," said the man who told them of the circumstances. "He was pitched out on his head, an' he wasn't worth picking up when they lifted him. Killed dead, an' him as drunk as a fiddler! Begod, I wouldn't like to die that way! It 'ud be a quare thing to go afore your Maker an' you stinkin' wi' drink!"

The men went on, leaving Sheila and Henry together. She stood watching the men, oblivious seemingly of Henry's presence, until he put out his hand and touched hers.

"Sheila!" he said.

She snatched her hand away from him. "Lave me alone!" she exclaimed, and moved to the side of the road further from him.

"I meant to try and stop it," he said, "but somehow I couldn't I ... I did my best!"

He had followed her and was standing before her, pleading with her, but she would not look at him. He stood for a while, thinking of something to say, and then put out his hand again and touched hers. "Sheila," he said.

She swung round swiftly and struck him in the face with her clenched fist.

"How dare you touch me!" she cried and her eyes were full of fury.

"Sheila!"

"Don't lay a finger on me ... you ... you coward you! You were afeard to stop it, an' you run away, cryin' like a wee ba!" He tried to come to her again, but she shrunk away from him. "Don't come a-near me," she shouted at him. "I couldn't thole you near me. I'd be sick!..."

She stopped in her speech and walked away from him. He stared after her, unable to think or move. He could feel the smart of her blow tingling in his face, and he put his hand up mechanically to his cheek, and as he did so, he saw that his hand was still trembling. He could see her walking quickly on, her head erect and her hands clenched tightly by her side. He wanted to run after her, but he could not move. He tried to call to her, but his lips would not open....

The light was fading out of the sky, and the night was covering up the hills and fields, but still he stood there, staring up the road along which she had passed out of his sight. People passed him in the dusk and greeted him, but he did not answer, nor was he aware when they turned to look at him. Once, he was conscious of a loud report and a clatter of feet, but he did not think of it or of what it meant. In his mind, smashing like the blows of a hammer, came ceaselessly the sound of Sheila's voice, calling him a coward....

8

It was quite dark when he moved away. His mouth was very dry and his eyes were hot and sore, and his legs dragged as he walked. He was tired and miserable and he had a frightful sense of age. That morning he had wakened to manhood, full of pleasure in the beauty of living and growing things; now, he was like an old man, longing for death but afraid to lose his life. There were stars above him, but no moon, and the tall trunks of the trees stood up like black phantoms before him, moaning and crying in the wind. He could hear the screech-owls hooting in the dark, and the lonely yelp of a dog on a farm.

He began to hurry, walking quickly and then running, afraid to look back, almost afraid to look forward ... and as he ran, suddenly he fell on something soft. His hands slipped on wetness that smelt....

In the darkness he had fallen over the body of the horse which had been shot while he was standing where Sheila had left him. He gaped at it with distended eyes, and then, with a loud cry, he jumped up and fled home, with fear raging in his heart.



THE EIGHTH CHAPTER

1

He fell asleep, after a long, wakeful night, and did not hear the maid who called him. Mr. Quinn, when he was told of the heaviness of Henry's slumber, said "Let him lie on!" and so it was that he did not rise until noon. He came down heavy-eyed and irritable, and wandered about the garden in which he took no pleasure. Marsh came to him while he was there, full of enthusiasm because more pupils had attended the Language class than he had anticipated.

"That girl, Sheila Morgan, wasn't there!"

"Oh!" said Henry.

"I thought she'd be certain to come. She seemed so anxious to join the class. Perhaps she was prevented. I hope you'll be able to come to-night, Henry!..."

Henry turned away impatiently. "I don't think I shall go again," he said in a surly voice.

Marsh stared at him. "Not go again!" he exclaimed.

"No."

"But!..."

"Oh, I'm sick of the class. I'm sick of the whole thing. I'm sick of Irish!..."

Marsh walked away from him, walked so quickly that Henry knew that he was trying to subdue the sudden rage that rose in him when people spoke slightingly of Irish things, and for a few moments he felt sorry and ready to follow him and apologise for what he had said; but the sorrow passed as quickly as it came.

"It's absurd of him to behave like that," he said to himself, and went on his way about the garden.

Presently he saw Marsh approaching him, and he stood still and waited for him.

"I'm sorry, Henry," Marsh said when he had come up to him.

"It was my fault," Henry replied.

"I ought not to have walked off like that ... but I can't bear to hear any one talking!..."

"I know you can't," Henry interrupted. "That's why I ought not to have said what I did!"

But Marsh insisted on bearing the blame. "I ought to have remembered that you're not feeling well," he said, reproaching himself. "I get so interested in Ireland that I forget about people's feelings. That's my chief fault. I know it is. I must try to remember.... I suppose you didn't really mean what you said?"

"Yes, I did," Henry replied quickly.

"But why?"

"I don't know. I just don't want to. What's the good of it anyhow?..."

Good of it! Henry ought to have known what a passion of patriotism his scorn for the Language would provoke.

"Oh, all right, John!" he said impatiently. "I've heard all that before, and I don't want to hear it again. You can argue as much as you like, but I can't see any sense in wasting time on what's over. And the Irish language is over and done with. Father's quite right!"

Marsh's anger became intensified. "That's the Belfast spirit in you," he exclaimed. "The pounds, shillings and pence mood! I know what you think of the language. You think, what is the commercial value of it? Will it enable a boy to earn thirty shillings a week in an office? Is it as useful as Pitman's Shorthand? That's what you're thinking!..."

"No, it's not, but if it were, it would be very sensible!"

"My God, Henry, can't you realise that a nation's language is the sound of a nation's soul? Don't you understand, man, that if we can't speak our own language then our souls are silent, dumb, inarticulate?... don't you see what I mean?... and all the time we're using English, we're like people who read translations. I don't care whether it is commercially valuable or not. That's not the point. The point is that it's us, that it's our tongue, our language, that it distinguishes us from the English, insists on our difference from them. Do you see what I mean, Henry? We are different, aren't we? You realise that, don't you? We are different from the English, and nothing will ever make us like them. My God, I'd hate to be like them!..."

Henry fled from him, and, scarcely knowing what he was doing, ran across the fields towards Hamilton's farm. As he went up the "loanie," he remembered that Sheila had struck him in the face in her rage at his cowardice, and he stopped and wondered whether he should go on or not. And while he was waiting in the "loanie," she came out of a field, driving a cow before her.

2

She did not speak, though he waited for her to say something. The cow ambled up the "loanie," and Sheila, glancing at him as if she did not recognise him, passed on, following it.

"Sheila!" he called after her, but she did not answer, nor did she turn round.

"I want to speak to you," he said, going after her.

"I don't want to speak to you," she replied, without looking at him.

"But you must!..." He thrust himself in front of her, and tried to take hold of her hands, but she eluded him. She lifted the sally rod she had in her hand and threatened him with it. "I'll lash your face with this if you handle me," she said.

"All right," he answered, dropping his hands and waiting for her to beat his face with the slender branch.

She looked at him for a few moments, and then she threw the sally rod into the hedge.

"What do you want?" she asked, and the tone of her voice was quieter.

The cow, finding that it was not being followed, cropped the grass in the hedge and as they stood there, facing each other, they could hear the soft munch-munch as it tore the grass from the ground.

"What do you want?" Sheila said again.

"I want to speak to you!..."

"Well, speak away!"

But he did not know what to say to her. He thought that perhaps if he were to explain, she would forgive, but now that the opportunity to explain was open to him, he did not know what to say.

"Are you turned dummy or what?" she asked, and the cruelty in her voice was deliberate.

"Sheila," he began, hesitatingly.

"Well?"

"I'm sorry about last night!"

"What's the good of bein' sorry?..."

"I meant to stop it!..."

"I daresay," she said, laughing at him.

"I did. I did, indeed. I can't help feeling nervous. I've always been like that. I want to do things ... I try to do them ... but something inside me runs away ... that's what it is, Sheila ... it isn't me that runs away ... it's something inside me!"

"Bosh," she said.

"It's true, Sheila. My father could tell you that. I always funk things, not because I want to funk them, but because I can't help it. I'd give the world to be able to stop a horse, like that one last night, but I can't do it. I get paralysed somehow!..."

"I never heard of any one like that before," she exclaimed.

"No, I don't suppose you have. If you knew how ashamed I feel of myself, you'd feel sorry for me. I was awake the whole night!"

"Were you?"

"Yes. I kept on thinking you were angry with me and that I was a coward, and I could feel your fist in my face!..."

"I'm sorry I hit you, Henry!"

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "It served me right. And then when I did sleep, I kept on dreaming about it. Do you know, Sheila, I fell over the horse last night in the dark ... they left it lying in the road after they shot it ... and my hands slithered in the blood!..."

"Aw, the poor baste!" she said, and she began to cry. "The poor dumb baste!"

"And I kept on dreaming of that ... my hands dribbling in blood.... och!..."

He could not go on because the recollection of his dreams horrified him. They had moved to the side of the "loanie" and he mechanically stopped and plucked a long grass and began to wind it round his fingers.

"I think and think about things," he murmured at last.

She put out her hand and touched his arm. "Poor Henry," she said.

He threw the grass away and seized her hand in his.

"Then you'll forgive me?" he said eagerly.

She nodded her head.

"And you'll still be my sweetheart, won't you, and go for walks with me?..."

She withdrew her hand from his. "No, Henry," she said, "you an' me can't go courtin' no more!"

"But why?"

"Because I couldn't marry a man was afeard of things. I'd never be happy with a man like that. I'd fall out with you if you were a collie, I know I would, an' I'd be miserable if my man hadn't the pluck of any other man. I'm sorry I bate you last night, but I'd do it again if it happened another time ... an' there'd be no good in that!"

"But you said you'd marry me!..."

"Och, sure, Henry, you know well I couldn't marry you. You wouldn't be let. I'm a poor girl, an' you're a high-up lad. Whoever heard tell of the like of us marryin', except mebbe in books. I knew well we'd never marry, but I liked goin' about with you, an' listenin' to your crack, an' you kissin' me an' tellin' me the way you loved me. You've a quare nice English voice on you, an' you know it well, an' I just liked to hear it ... but didn't I know rightly, you'd never marry the like of me!"

"I will, Sheila, I will!"

"Ah, wheesht with you. What good 'ud a man like you be to a girl like me. I'll have this farm when my Uncle Matt dies, an' what use 'ud you be on it, will you tell me, you that runs away cryin' from a frightened horse?"

"You could sell the farm!..."

"Sell the farm!" she exclaimed. "Dear bless us, boy, what are you sayin' at all? Sell this farm, an' it's been in our family these generations past! There's been Hamiltons in this house for a hundred an' fifty years an' more. I wouldn't sell it for the world!"

"But I must have you, Sheila. I must marry you!"

"Why must you?"

"I just must!..."

She turned to look at the grazing cow, and then turned back to him. "That's chile's talk," she said. "You must because you must. Away on home now, an' lave me to do my work. Sure, you're not left school yet!" She left him abruptly, and walked up to the cow, slapping its flanks and shouting "Kimmup, there! Kimmup!" and the beast tossed its head, and ran forward a few paces, and then sauntered slowly up the "loanie" towards the byre.

"Good-bye, Henry!" Sheila called out when she had gone a little way.

"Will you be at the class to-night!" he shouted after her.

"I will not," she answered. "I'm not goin' to the class no more!"

He watched her as she went on up the "loanie" after the cow, hoping that she would turn again and call to him, but she did not look round. He could hear her calling to the beast, "Gwon now! Gwon out of that now!" and then he saw the cow turn into the yard, and in a moment or two Sheila followed it. He thought that she must turn to look at him then, and he was ready to wave his hand to her, but she did not look round. "Gwon now! Gwon up out of that!" was all that he heard her saying.

3

His father was standing at the front door when he returned home. Mr. Quinn's face was set and grave looking, and he did not smile at his son.

"I want you, Henry," he said, beckoning to him.

"Yes, father?" Henry replied, looking at his father in a questioning fashion. "Is anything wrong?"

Mr. Quinn did not answer. He turned and led the way to the library.

"Sit down," he said, when Henry had entered the room and shut the door.

"What is it, father?"

"Henry, what's between you an' that niece of Matt Hamilton's?"

"Between us!"

"Aye, between you. You were out on the Ballymena road with her last night when I thought you were in bed with a sore head."

All the romance of his love for Sheila Morgan suddenly died out, and he was conscious of nothing but his father's stern look and the stiff set of his lips as he sat there at his writing-table, demanding what there was between Henry and Sheila.

"I'm in love with her, father!" he answered.

"Are you?"

"Yes, father, but she's not in love with me. She's just told me so."

"You've seen her this mornin' again?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm glad she has more sense nor you seem to have. Damn it, Henry, are you a fool or what? The whole of Ballymartin's talkin' about the pair of you. Do you think that you can walk up the road with a farm-girl, huggin' her an' kissin' her an' doin' God knows what, an' the whole place not know about it?"

"I didn't think of that, father!..."

"Didn't think of it!... Look here, Henry, Sheila Morgan's a respectable girl, do you hear? an' I'll not have you makin' a fool of her. I know there's some men thinks they have a right to their tenants' daughters, but by God if you harmed a girl on my land, Henry, I'd shoot you with my own hands. Do you hear me?"

Henry looked at his father uncomprehendingly. "Harm her, father!" he said.

"Aye, harm her! What do you think a girl like that, as good-lookin' as her, gets out of goin' up the road with a lad like you that's born above her! A bellyful of pain, that's all!"

"I don't know what you mean, father!"

"Well, it's time you learned. I'll talk to you plumb an' plain, Henry. I'll not let you seduce a girl on my land, do you hear? They can do that sort of thing in England, if they like ... it's nothin' to me what the English do ... but by God I'll not have a girl on my land ruined by you or by anybody else!"

Mr. Quinn's voice was more angry than Henry had ever heard it.

"Father," Henry said, "I want to marry Sheila!..."

"What?"

Mr. Quinn's fist had been raised as if he were about to bang his desk to emphasise his words, but he was so startled by Henry's speech that he forgot his intention, and he sat there, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, with his fist still suspended in the air, so that Henry almost laughed at his comical look.

"What's that you say?" he said, when he had recovered

"I want to marry her, but she won't have me!"

Mr. Quinn's anger left him. He leant back in his revolving chair and laughed.

"By God, that's good!" he said. "By God, it is! Marry her! Oh, dear, oh, dear!"

"I don't know why you're laughing, father!..."

"An' I thought you up to no good. Oh, ho, ho!" He took out his handkerchief and rubbed his eyes. "Well, thank God, the girl's got more wit nor you have. In the name of God, lad, what would you marry her for?"

"Because I love her, father!"

"My backside to that for an answer!" Mr. Quinn snapped. "You know well you couldn't marry her, a girl like that!"

"I don't know it at all!..."

"Well, I'll tell you why then. Because you're a gentleman an' she isn't a lady, that's why. There's hundreds of years of breedin' in you, Henry, an' there's no breedin' at all in her, nothin' but good nature an' good looks!..."

"The Hamiltons have lived at their farm for more than a hundred and fifty years, father!"

"So they have, an' decent, good stock they are, but that doesn't put them on our level. Listen, Henry, the one thing that's most important in this world is blood an' breedin'. There's people goes about the world sayin' everybody's as good as everybody else, but you've only got to see people when there's bother on to find out who's good an' who isn't. It's at times like that that blood an' breedin' come out!..."

It was then that Henry told his father of his cowardice when the horse ran away. He told the whole story, and insisted on Sheila's scorn for him. Mr. Quinn did not speak while the story was being told. He sat at the desk with his chin buried in his fingers, listening patiently. Once or twice he looked up when Henry hesitated in his recital, and once he seemed as if he were about to put out his hand to his son, but he did not do so. He did not speak or move until the story was ended.

"I'm glad you told me, Henry," he said quietly when Henry had finished. "I'm sorry I thought you were meanin' the girl an injury. I beg your pardon for that, Henry. The girl's a decent girl, a well-meant girl ... a well-meant girl!... I wish to God, you were at Trinity, my son! Come on, now, an' have somethin' to ate. Begod, I'm hungry. I could ate a horse. I could ate two horses!..." He put his arm in Henry's and they left the library together. "You'll get over it, my son, you'll get over it. It does a lad good to break his heart now an' again. Teaches him the way the world works! Opens his mind for him, an' lets him get a notion of the feel of things!..."

They were just outside the dining-room when he said that. Mr. Quinn turned and looked at Henry for a second or two, and it seemed to Henry that he was about to say something intimate to him, but he did not do so: he turned away quickly and opened the door.

"I suppose John Marsh is eatin' all the food," he said with extraordinary heartiness. "Are you eatin' all the food, John Marsh? I'll wring your damned neck if you are!..."

4

That evening, after dinner, Mr. Quinn and John Marsh were sitting together. Henry had gone out of the room for a while, leaving Mr. Quinn to smoke a cigar while John Marsh corrected some exercises by the students of the Language class.

"Marsh!" Mr. Quinn said suddenly, after a long silence.

Marsh looked up quickly. "Yes, Mr. Quinn!" he replied.

"Henry's in love!..."

"Is he?"

"Yes. With that girl. Sheila Morgan, Matt Hamilton's niece!"

Marsh put his exercises aside. "Dear me!" he exclaimed.

There did not appear to be anything else to say.

"So I'm goin' to send him away," Mr. Quinn went on.

"Away?"

"Yes. I don't quite know where I shall send him. It's too soon yet to send him up to Trinity. I've a notion of sendin' you an' him on a walkin' tour in Connacht. The pair of you can talk that damned language 'til you're sick of it with the people that understands it!"

Marsh was delighted. He thought that Mr. Quinn's proposal was excellent, and he was certain that it would be very good for Henry to come into contact with people to whom the language was native.

"Wheesht a minute, Marsh!" Mr. Quinn interrupted. "I want to talk to you about Henry. It's a big thing for a lad of his age to fall in love!"

"I suppose it is."

"There's no supposin' about it. It is! He's just at the age when women begin to matter to a man, an' I don't want him to go an' get into any bother over the head of them!"

"Bother?"

"Aye. Do you never think about women, John Marsh?"

"Oh, yes. Sometimes. One can't help it now and then!..."

"No, begod, one can't!" Mr. Quinn exclaimed. "Do you know this, John Marsh, I never can make out whether God did a good day's work the day He made women! They're the most unsettlin' things in the world. You'd think to look at me, I was a fairly quiet sort of a steady man, wouldn't you? Well, I'm not. There's whiles when a woman makes my head buzz ... just the look of her, an' the way she turns her head or moves her legs. I'm a hefty fellow, John Marsh, for all I'm the age I am, an' I know what it is to feel damn near silly with desire. But all the same, I can keep control of myself, an' I've never wronged a woman in my life. That's a big thing for any man to be able to say, an' there's few that can say it, but I tell you it's been a hell of a fight!..."

He lay back in the chair and puffed smoke above his head for a while. "A hell of a fight," he murmured, and then did not speak for a while.

"Yes?" said John Marsh.

"I've been down the lanes of a summer night, an' seen young girls from the farms about, with fine long hair hangin' down their backs, an' them smilin' an' lovely ... an' begod, I've had to hurry past them, hurry hard, damn near run!... Mind you, they were good girls, John Marsh! I don't want you to think they were out lookin' for men. They weren't. But they were young, an' they were just learnin' things, an' I daresay I could have had them if I'd tried ... an' I don't think there's any real harm in men an' women goin' together ... but we've settled, all of us, that, real or no real, there is some sort of harm in it, an' we've agreed to condemn that sort of thing, an' so I submit to the law. Do you follow me?"

"No, not quite. Those sort of things don't arise for me. I'm a Catholic and I obey the Church's laws!..."

"I know you do. But I'm a man, not a Catholic!... Now, don't lose your temper. I couldn't help lettin' that slip out.... What I mean is this. There's a lot of waywardness in all of us, that's pleasant enough if it's checked when it gets near the limit of things, but there has to be a check!"

"Yes?" Marsh said. "And in my case the check is the Church, the expression on earth of God's will!..."

"Well, in my case it isn't. In my case it's my sense of responsibility as a gentleman. We've got ourselves into crowds that must be controlled somehow, and there isn't much room for wayward people in a crowd. That's why geniuses get such a rotten time. Now, my notion of a gentleman is a man who controls the crowd by controllin' himself. D'you follow me? He knows that the crowd'll bust up an' become a dirty riot if it's let out of control, an' he knows that he can influence it best an' keep the whip hand of it, if it knows that he isn't doin' anything that he tells it not to do. D'you see?"

"Yes," Marsh said. "That's the Catholic religion!..."

"I know as well as I'm livin'," Mr. Quinn went on, "that I have enough power over myself to know when to stop an' when to go on. That's been bred in me. That's why I'm a gentleman. But I know that if I let myself do things that I can control, I'll be givin' an example to hundreds of other people who aren't gentlemen an' can't control themselves ... don't know when to stop an' when to go on ... an' so I don't do them. An' that's a gentleman's job, John Marsh, an' when gentlemen stop that, then begod it's good-bye to a decent community. That's why England's goin' to blazes ... because her gentlemen have forgotten the first job of the gentleman: to keep himself in strict control, to be reticent, to conceal his feelings!"

But John Marsh would not agree with him. "England is going to blazes," he said, "because England has lost her religion. If England were Catholic, England would be noble again!..."

"Just like France and Spain and Italy," Mr. Quinn replied. "Bosh, John Marsh, bosh! I tell you, the test of a nation is this question of gentlemen!..."

"The test of a nation is its belief in God ... its church," said John Marsh.

"Well, Ireland believes in God, doesn't it? The Catholic Church is fairly strong here, isn't it? An' what sort of a Church is it? A gentleman's church or a peasant's church? Look at the priests, John Marsh, look at them! My God, what bounders! Little greedy, grubbin' blighters, livin' for their Easter offerin's, an' doin' damn little for their money. What do you think takes them into the church? Love of God? Love of man? No, bedam if it is. Conceit an' snobbery an' the desire for a soft job takes about nine out of ten of them.... Well, well, I'm runnin' away from myself. What I want to say is this: the Catholic church'll never be worth a damn in Ireland or anywhere else, 'til its priests are gentlemen. No church is worth a damn unless its priests are gentlemen!"

"But what do you mean by gentlemen, Mr. Quinn?"

"I mean men who are keepin' a tight hold on themselves. Mortifyin' their flesh ... all that sort of stuff ... so that they won't give the mob an excuse for breakin' loose!"

Marsh wondered why Mr. Quinn was talking in this strain and tried to draw him back to the subject of Henry's love of Sheila.

"I'm comin' to that," said Mr. Quinn, pointing his cigar at him. "Listen, John, there were two men that might have done big things in Irelan' and Englan'—Parnell an' Lord Randolph Churchill, an' they didn't because they weren't gentlemen. They couldn't control themselves. There isn't a house in Ulster that hasn't got the photographs of those two men in some album...."

"Parnell?" Marsh exclaimed.

"Aye, Parnell. Him an' Randy Churchill side by side in the one album! Lord bless me, John Marsh, the Ulster people took great pride in Parnell, even the bitterest Orangeman among them, because he was a man, an' not a gas-bag like Dan O'Connell. Of course, he was a Protestant!... But he couldn't keep from nuzzlin' over a woman ... an' up went everything. An' Randy Churchill ... I mind him well, a flushed-lookin' man.... I heard him talkin' in Belfast one time ... he bust up everything because he would not control himself. If he'd been a gentleman ... but he wasn't ... the Churchills never were.... Nor was Parnell. Well, now, I don't want Henry to go to bits like that. Henry's got power of some sort, John ... I don't know what sort ... but there's power in him ... and I want it to come out right. He's the sort that'll go soft on women if he's not careful. He'd be off after every young, nice-lookin' girl he meets if he were let ... an' God knows what the end of that would be. There's this girl, Sheila Morgan ... you've seen her?..."

Marsh nodded his head, and said, "She comes to the Language class."

"Well, you know the sort she is: fine, healthy, good-lookin', lusty girl. That sort stirs the blood in a lad like Henry. I want him to get into the state in which he can look at her an' lave her alone! Do you follow me?"

"Yes."

"He's not in that state now. He's soft, oh, he's damned soft. Look here, John Marsh, do you know what I think about young fellows? I think they're the finest things in the world. Youth, I mean. An' I figure it out this way, that Youth has the right to three things: love an' work an' fun; an' it ought to have them about equally. The only use of old people like me is to see that the young 'uns don't get the proportions all wrong, too much love an' not enough work, or the other way round. Henry's very likely to get them all wrong, an' I want to see that he doesn't. Now, you understand me, don't you? I'm a long-winded man, an' it's hard to make out what I'm drivin' at, but that can't be helped. Everybody has a nature, an' I have mine, an' bedam to it!"

"What do you want me to do?" Marsh asked, putting his exercises together.

"I want you to try an' put some big wish into his heart," Mr. Quinn replied. "Try an' make him as eager about Irelan' as you are. I want him to spend himself for something that's bigger than he is, instead of spendin' himself on something that's smaller than he is."

"But why not do that yourself, Mr. Quinn?"

Mr. Quinn got up from his chair and walked about the room. "It's very hard for a man to talk to his son in the way that a stranger can," he said. "An' besides I ... I love Henry, John Marsh, an' my love for him upsets my balance!"

"Can't you control that, Mr. Quinn?" Marsh asked.

"Control it! Begod, John Marsh, if you were a father you wouldn't ask such a damn silly question. Here, have a cigar! Henry's comin' back!"

When Henry entered the room, his father was lying back in his chair, puffing smoke into the air, while John Marsh was cutting the end of his cigar.

"The post's come in," he said.

"Anything for me?" his father asked.

"No. There was only one letter. For me. It's from Ninian Graham!"

"Nice chap, Ninian Graham," Mr. Quinn murmured.

"He wants me to go over to Boveyhayne for a while."

"Does he?"

"Yes. Gilbert Farlow's staying with them. I should like to go."

"Well, we'll see about it in the morning," said Mr. Quinn. "I was thinking of sending you on a walking tour with John here. To Connacht!"

"You could talk to the people in Irish, Henry," John added.

Henry twirled Ninian's letter in his fingers. "I'd like to go to Boveyhayne," he said. "I want to see Ninian and Gilbert again!..."

"But the language, Henry!..."

"I hate the damned language!" Henry exclaimed passionately. "I'm sick of Ireland. I'm sick of!..."

Mr. Quinn got up and put his hand on Henry's shoulder.

"All right, Henry," he said. "You can go to Boveyhayne!"

5

Up in his bedroom, Henry re-read Ninian's letter, and then he replied to it. Ninian wrote:

Blighter:

Gilbert's here. He's been here for a week, and he says you ought to be here, too. So do I. Can't you come to Boveyhayne for a fortnight anyhow? If you can stay longer, do. Gilbert says it's awful to think that you're going to that hole in Dublin where there isn't even a Boat Race, and the least you can do is to come and have a good time here. I can't think why Irish people want to be Irish. It seems so damn silly. Gilbert's writing a play. He has done about a page and a half of it, and it's most awful bilge. He keeps on reading it out to me. He read some of it to me last night when I was brushing my teeth which is a damn dangerous thing to do, and I had to clout his head severely for him. He is a chap. He got poor Mary into a row on Sunday. We took him to church with us, and when the Vicar was reading the first lesson, all about King Solomon swanking before the Queen of Sheba and showing off his gold plate, Gilbert turned to Mary and said out loud, "Ostentatious chap, Solomon! Anybody could see he was a Jew!" and Mary burst out laughing. The Vicar was frightfully sick about it, and jawed Gilbert after the service, and the mater told Mary the truth about herself. I must say it was rather funny. I very nearly laughed myself. Do be a decent chap and come over soon. You'll just be in time for the mackerel fishing. Gilbert and Mary and I went out with Jim Rattenbury yesterday and caught dozens.

Your affectionate friend,

Ninian Graham.

Henry's reply was:

Dear Ninian:

Thanks awfully. I'll come as soon as I can get away. I spoke to my father to-night, and he says I can go to Boveyhayne. I'll send a telegram to you, telling you when to expect me. I'm looking forward to reading Gilbert's play. I hope he'll have more of it written by the time I get to Boveyhayne. A page and a half isn't much, is it? and I don't wonder you get sick of hearing it over and over. I shall have to write something, too, but I don't know what to write about. We can talk of that when we meet. It is awfully kind of Mrs. Graham to have me again. Please thank her for me, and give my love to Mary and Gilbert, and tell him not to be an old ass, yapping like that in church. No wonder the vicar was sick.

Your affectionate friend,

Henry Quinn.



THE NINTH CHAPTER

1

Three days later, Henry left Ballymartin and travelled to Belfast in the company of John Marsh. In Belfast they were to separate: Marsh was to return to Dublin and Henry was to cross by the night boat to Liverpool, and proceed from there to London, and then on from Waterloo to Boveyhayne. Marsh, a little sad because the Ballymartin classes must now collapse, but greatly glad to return to the middle of Irish activities in Dublin, had turned over in his mind what Mr. Quinn had said about Henry's future, and he was wondering exactly what he should say to Henry. They had several hours to spend in Belfast, and Marsh proposed that they should visit the shipyards and, if they had time, inspect a linen mill; and Henry, who had always felt great pride when he saw the stocks and gantries of the shipyards and reflected that out of the multitudinous activities of Ulster men the greatest ships in the world were created, eagerly assented to Marsh's proposal. Mr. Quinn had given them a letter of introduction to a member of the great firm of Harland and Wolff, and Mr. Arthurs, because of his friendship for Mr. Quinn, conducted them through the yard himself.

They stayed so long in the shipyard that there was no time left for the visit to the linen mill, and so, when they had had tea, they set off to the Great Northern Railway station where Marsh was to catch his train to Dublin.

Mr. Arthurs' immense energy and his devotion to his work and his extraordinary pride not only in the shipyard but in the men who worked in it had made a deep impression on Marsh and Henry. He seemed to know the most minute details of the vast complication of functions that operated throughout the works. While they were passing through one of the shops, a horn had blown, and instantly a great crowd of men and lads had poured out of the yard on their way to their dinner, and Mr. Arthurs, standing aside to watch them, and greeting here one and there another, turned to Marsh and said, "Those are my pals!" Thousands of men, grimy from their work, each of them possessed of some peculiar skill or great strength, thousands of them, "pals" of this one man whose active brain conceived ships of great magnitude and endurance! Mr. Arthurs had passed through the shipyard from apprenticeship to directorship: he had worked in this shop and in that, just as the men worked, and had learned more about shipbuilding than it seemed possible for any man to learn. "He knows how many rivets there are in the Oceanic," one of the foremen in the yard said to Marsh when they were being shown round. "He's the great boy for buildin' boats!"

Marsh, until then, had never met a man like Mr. Arthurs. His life had been passed in Dublin, among people who thought and talked and speculated, but seldom did; and he had been habituated to scoffing talk at Belfast men ... "money-grubbers" ... mitigated, now and then, by a grudging tribute to their grit and great energy and resource. Mr. Arthurs had none of the money-grubbing spirit in him; his devotion to his work of shipbuilding was as pure as the devotion of a Samurai to the honour of Japan; and Marsh, who was instantly sensitive to the presence of a noble man, felt strongly drawn to him.

"I wish we could get him on our side, Henry!" he said, as they sat in the station, waiting for the train to draw up to the platform. "I'd give all the lawyers we've got for that one man!"

"Father thinks Tom Arthurs is the greatest shipbuilder that's ever lived," Henry answered.

"He might be the greatest Irishman that's ever lived," Marsh rejoined, "if he'd only give a quarter of the devotion to Ireland that he gives to ships."

"I suppose he thinks he's giving all his devotion to Ireland now ... and he is really. Isn't he, John? His firm is famous all over the world, and he's one of the men that have made it famous. It must be very fine for him to think that he's doing big things for his country!"

Marsh nodded his head. "We're rather foolish about Belfast in Dublin," he said. "After all, real work is done here, isn't it? And the chief industry of Dublin ... what is it? Absolutely unproductive! Porter! Barrels and barrels of it, floating down the Liffey and nothing, nothing real, floating back! I like that man Arthurs. I wish to heaven we had him on our side!"

"He's a Unionist," Henry replied.

It occurred to Marsh, in the middle of his reflections on Tom Arthurs, that he should ask Henry what he proposed to do for Ireland.

"I'd like to do work as big and fine as Arthurs does," he said. "Wouldn't you, Henry?"

"Yes."

"What do you propose to do, Henry?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought definitely about that sort of thing yet. I've just imagined I'd like to do something. I'm afraid I can't build ships!..."

"There are other things besides ships, Henry!"

"I know that. John, I'm going to say something that'll make you angry, but I can't help that. When Tom Arthurs was showing us over the Island, I couldn't help thinking that all that Gaelic movement was a frightful waste of time!" Marsh made a gesture, but Henry would not let him speak. "No, don't interrupt me, John," he said. "I must say what I feel. Look at the Language class at Ballymartin. What's been the good of all the work you put into it?"

"We've given them a knowledge of a national separateness, haven't we?"

"Have we? They were keener on the dances, John. I don't believe we've done anything of the sort, and if we had, I think it would be a pity!"

"A pity! A pity to make the Irish people realise that they're Irish and different from the English!"

"Oh, you won't agree, I know, John, but I think Tom Arthurs is doing better work for Ireland than you are," Henry retorted.

"He's doing good work, very good work, but not better work than I am. He's establishing an Irish industry, but I'm helping to establish an Irish nation, an Irish soul!..."

"That's what you want to do, but I wonder whether it's what you are doing," said Henry.

They were silent for a while, and before they spoke again, the train backed into the station, and they passed through the barriers so that Marsh could secure his seat.

"Well, what do you propose to do for Ireland?" Marsh asked again, when he had entered his carriage.

"The best I can, I suppose. I don't know yet!..."

Marsh turned quickly to Henry and put his hand on his shoulder. "Henry," he said, "I hope you don't mind ... I know about Sheila Morgan and you!..."

"You know?..."

"Yes. I'm sorry about that. I don't think you should let it upset you!"

Henry did not reply for a few moments, but sat still staring in front of him. In a sub-conscious way, he was wondering why it was that the carriages were not cleaner....

"I'm frightfully miserable, John," he said at last.

"But why, Henry?"

"Oh, because of everything. I don't know. I'm a fool, I suppose!"

"You're not going to pieces just because you've fallen in love with a girl and it's turned out wrong? My dear Henry, that's a poor sort of a spirit!"

"I know it is, but I'm a sloppy fellow!..."

"This affair with Sheila Morgan is all the more reason why you should think of something big to do. I wish you were coming to Dublin with me now. Dublin's very beautiful in the summer, and we could go up into the mountains and talk about things."

"Oh, well, we shall meet in Dublin fairly soon," Henry replied, smiling at Marsh. It had been settled that he was to enter Trinity a little earlier than his father had previously planned.

"Yes, that's true!"

The hour at which the train was due to depart came, and Henry got out of the carriage and stood on the platform while Marsh, his head thrust through the window, talked to him.

"You might write to me," he said. "We ought not to drift away from each other, Henry!..."

"We won't do that. We'll see each other in Dublin."

"Yes, of course. You must meet Galway when you come back. He's a schoolmaster and a barrister and a poet and heaven knows what not. He's a splendid fellow. Perhaps he'll persuade you to take more interest in Irish things!"

"Perhaps!"

The guard blew his whistle, and the train began to move out of the station.

"Don't get too English, Henry!" Marsh shouted, waving his hand in farewell.

Henry smiled at him, but did not answer.

"Good-bye!" Marsh called to him.

"Good-bye!" Henry answered.

The train swung round a bend and disappeared on its way south, and Henry, strangely desolate, turned and walked away from the station.

2

In the excitement of leaving Ballymartin and sightseeing in the shipyard, he had almost forgotten Sheila Morgan, but now, his mind stimulated by his talk with Marsh and his spirit depressed by his loneliness, his thoughts returned to her, and it seemed to him that he detested her. She had insulted him, struck him, humiliated and shamed him. When he remembered that he had told her of his love for her and had asked her to marry him, and had been told in reply that she wanted a man, not a coward, he felt that he could not bear to return to Ireland again. His mood was mingled misery and gladness. At Boveyhayne, thank heaven, he would be free of Sheila and probably he would never think of her again. Gilbert and Ninian would fill his mind, and of course there would be Mrs. Graham and Mary. Mary! It was strange that he should have let Mary slip out of his thoughts and let Sheila slip into them. He had actually proposed to Mary and she had accepted him, and then he had left her and forgotten her because of Sheila. He remembered that he had not replied to the letter she had written to him before John Marsh came to Ballymartin. He had intended to write, but somehow he had not done so ... and then Sheila came, and it was impossible to write to her. He wondered what he should say to her when they met. Would she come to Whitcombe station to meet him? What was he to say to her?...

He had treated her shabbily. Of course, she was only a kid, as Ninian himself would say, but then he had made love to her, and anyhow she would be less of a kid now than she was when he last saw her.... He got tired of walking about the streets, and he made his way to the quays and passed across the gangway on to the deck of the steamer. A cool air was blowing up the Lagan from the Lough, and when he leaned over the side of the ship he could see the dark skeleton shape of the shipyard. His thoughts were extraordinarily confused, rambling about his father and Sheila Morgan and John Marsh and Mary Graham and Tom Arthurs and Ireland and ships and England and Gilbert Farlow and Ninian and Roger....

"I ought never to have thought of any one but Mary," he said to himself at last. "I really love her. I was only ... only passing the time with Sheila!"

"Well, thank God I'll soon be in Devonshire," he went on, "and out of all this. If only my Trinity time were over, and I were settled in London with Gilbert and the others, I'd be happy again!" He thought of John Marsh, and as he leant over the side of the boat, looking down on the dark water flowing beneath him, he seemed to see Marsh's eager face, framed in the window of the railway carriage. He almost heard Marsh saying again, "Well, what do you propose to do for Ireland?..."

"Oh, damn Ireland," he said out loud.

He walked away from the place where he had imagined he had seen Marsh's face peering at him out of the water, and as he walked along the deck, he could hear the noise of hammering in the shipyard made by the men on the night-shift. Tom Arthurs's brain was still working, though Tom Arthurs was now at home.

"That's real work," Henry murmured to himself, "and a lot better than gabbling about Ireland's soul as if it were the only soul in the world! Poor old John! I disappoint him horribly...." He was standing in the bows of the boat, looking towards the Lough. "I wonder," he said to himself, "whether Mary'll be at Whitcombe station!"

3

The peculiar sense of isolation which overwhelms an Irishman when he is in England, fell upon Henry the moment he climbed into the carriage at Lime Street station. None of the passengers in his compartment spoke to each other, whereas in Ireland, every member of the company would have been talking like familiars in a few minutes. About an hour after the train had left Liverpool, some one leant across to the passenger facing him and asked for a match, and a box of matches was passed to him without a word from the man who owned them. "Thanks!" said the passenger who had borrowed the box, as he returned it. No more was said by any one for half an hour, and then the man opposite to Henry stretched himself and said, "We're getting along!" and turned and laid his head against the window and went to sleep.

"We are different!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"

He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful, for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....

"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or think!..."

Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Henry remembered how Marsh had generalised about the English. "They live on their instincts," he had said. "They never live on their minds!" and he had quoted from an article in an English newspaper in which the writer had lamented over the decline and fall of intellect among his countrymen. The writer declared that no one would pay to see a play that made a greater demand upon the mind than is made in a musical comedy, and that even this slight demand was proving to be more than many people could bear: the picture palace was destroying even the musical comedy.

"But are we any better than that?" Henry had asked innocently, and Marsh, indignant, had declared that the Irish were immeasurably better than that.

"But are we?" Henry asked himself as the train swiftly moved towards London.

And through his mind there raced a long procession of questions for which he could not find answers. His mind was an active, searching mind, but it was immature, and there were great gaps in it that could only be filled after a long time and much experience. He had not the knowledge which would enable him to combat the opinions of Marsh, but some instinct in him caused him to believe that Marsh's views of England and Ireland were largely prejudiced views. "I don't feel any less friendly to Gilbert and Ninian and Roger than I do to John Marsh or any other Irishman, and I don't feel that John understands me better than they do!" That was the pivot on which all his opinions turned. He could only argue from his experience, and his experience was that this fundamental antagonism between the Irish and the English, on which John Marsh insisted, did not exist. When Marsh declared passionately that he did not wish to see Ireland made into a place like Lancashire, he was only stating something that many Englishmen said with equal passion about the unindustrialised parts of England. Gilbert Farlow denounced mill-owners with greater fury than Mr. Quinn denounced them.... It seemed to Henry that he could name an English equivalent for every Irish friend he had.

"There are differences, of course," he said to himself, remembering the silent company of passengers who shared his compartment, "but they don't matter very much!"

"I wish," he went on, "John Marsh weren't so bitter against the English. Lots of them would like him if he'd only let them!"

He looked out of the window at the wide fields and herds of cattle and comfortable farmhouses, built by men whose lives were more or less secure, and ... "Of course!" he exclaimed in his mind. "That's the secret of the whole thing! When our people have had security for life as long as these people have had it, their houses will be as good as these are, and their farms as rich and clean and comfortable!"

One had only to remember the history of Ireland to realise that many of the differences between the English and the Irish were no more than the differences between the hunter and the hunted, the persecutor and the persecuted. How could the Irish help having a lower standard of life than the English when their lives had been so disrupted and disturbed that it was difficult for them to have a standard of life at all? Now, when the disturbance was over and security of life had been obtained (after what misery and bitterness and cruel lack of common comprehension!) the Irish would soon set up a level of life that might ultimately be higher than that of the English.

"Of course," said Henry, remembering something that his father had said, "there'll be a Greedy Interval!"

The Greedy Interval, the first period of prosperity in Ireland when the peasants, coming suddenly from insecurity and poverty to safety and well-being, would claw at money like hungry beasts clawing at food, had been the subject of many arguments between Mr. Quinn and John Marsh, Mr. Quinn maintaining that greed was the principal characteristic of a peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it.

"Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By God, they buried their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that, John Marsh? They saw their own countrymen who had been fighting for them, starving, and they let them starve!..."

It was the same everywhere. "I never pass a patch of allotments," he said, "without thinkin' that their mean, ugly, little look is just like a peasant's mind, an' begod I'm glad when I'm past them an' can see wide lands again!" Peasants were greedy, narrow, unimaginative, lacking in public spirit. In France, in Belgium, in Holland and Russia, in all of which countries Mr. Quinn had travelled much, there was a peasant spirit powerfully manifested, and almost invariably that manifestation was shown in a mean manner.

"That's what your wonderful Land Laws are going to do for Ireland!" Mr. Quinn had exclaimed scornfully. "We're to be thrown out of our land, an' louts like Tom McCrum are to be put in our place!..."

Henry had sympathised with his father then, but he felt that the best of the argument was with John Marsh who had replied that the Irish landlords would never have been dispossessed of their land, if they had been worthy of it. "If they'd thought as much about their responsibilities as they thought about their rights, they'd still have their rights!" he said.

"I suppose that's so," Henry said to himself, picking up a paper that he had bought in Liverpool and beginning to read. "I must talk to Gilbert about it!"

4

Ninian and Gilbert met him at Whitcombe station. As he stood on the little platform of the carriage, he could see that Mary was not with them, and he felt disappointed. She might have come, too!...

"Here he is," he heard Gilbert shout to Ninian as the train drew up. "Hilloa, Quinny!"

"Hilloa, Gilbert!"

"Hop out quickly, will you!"

He hopped out as quickly as he could and said "Hilloa!" to Ninian, who said "Hilloa!" and slapped his back and called him an old rotter.

"Widger'll take your luggage," Gilbert said, taking control of their movements as he always did. "Hang on to this, Widger," he added, taking a handbag from Henry and throwing it into Widger's arms. "Show him the rest of your stuff, Quinny, and let's hook off. We're going to walk to Boveyhayne. You'll need a stretch after sitting all that time, and Ninian's getting disgustingly obese, so we make him run up and down the road over the cliff three times so's to thin him down!..."

"Funny ass!" said Ninian.

"Mrs. Graham wanted Mary to come with us, but we wouldn't let her. We're tired of females, Ninian and I, and Mary's very femaley at present. She's started to read poetry!..."

"Out loud!" Ninian growled. "I'm sick of people who read out loud to me. When Mary's not spouting stuff about 'love' and 'dove' and 'heaven above' and that sort of rot, Gilbert's reading his damn play to me!"

"I'll read it to you, Quinny!" Gilbert said, linking his arm in Henry's.

They had left the station, and were now walking along the unfinished road above the shingle. There was a heat haze hanging over the smooth blue sea, so that sky and water merged into each other imperceptibly. In front of them, they could see the white cliffs of Boveyhayne shining in the descending sun. There were great stalks of charlock, standing out of the grass on the face of the cliffs, giving them a golden head.

"If Marley's on Whitcombe beach, we'll row over to Boveyhayne," said Ninian. "You'd like to get on to the sea, wouldn't you, Quinny?"

Henry nodded his head.

"No," said Gilbert, "we won't. We'll sit here for a while, and I'll read my play to Quinny. I carry it about with me, Quinny, so that I can read it to Ninian whenever his spirits are low!"

"I never saw such a chap!" Ninian mumbled.

"This great, hairy, beefy fellow," Gilbert went on, seizing hold of Ninian's arm with his disengaged hand, "does not love literature!..."

Ninian broke free from Gilbert's grip. "Marley is on the beach," he said, and ran ahead to engage the boat.

"Well, Quinny!" said Gilbert, when Ninian had gone.

"Well, Gilbert!" Henry replied.

"How's Ireland? Still making an ass of itself?"

Henry made no answer to Gilbert's question because he knew that an answer was not expected. Had any one else spoken in that fashion to him, any other Englishman, he would probably have angered instantly, but Gilbert was different from all other people in Henry's eyes, and was privileged to say whatever he pleased.

"Gilbert," he said, "I want to have a long jaw with you about something!..."

The English way of speaking came naturally to him, and he said "a long jaw about something" as easily as if he had never been outside an English public school.

"What?" Gilbert said.

"Oh, everything. Ireland and things!"

"All right, my son!"

"You see!..."

"Wait though," said Gilbert, "until we catch up with Ninian. He ought to hear it, too. He has a wise old noddle, Ninian, although he's such a fat 'un.... My God, Quinny, isn't he getting big? If he piles up any more muscle, hell have to go to Trinity Hall and join the beefy brutes and get drunk and all that kind of manly thing!" They came up with Ninian as he spoke. "Won't you, Ninian?"

"Won't I what?" Ninian replied.

"Have to go to Trinity Hall if you go on being a beefy Briton. Hilloa, Marley!"

"Good-evenin', sir!" said old Marley.

They got into the boat, and Ninian rowed them round the white cliff to Boveyhayne beach, where they left the boat and walked up the village street to the lane that led to Boveyhayne Manor.

"Henry wants to talk about the world, Ninian!" said Gilbert as they left the beach. "We'd better have a good old gabble after dinner to-night, hadn't we?"

"It doesn't matter what I say," said Ninian, "you'll gabble anyhow. Anything to keep him from reading his blooming play to me!" he added, turning to Henry.

5

He had a sense of disappointment when he met Mary. In his reaction from Sheila Morgan, he had imagined Mary coming to greet him with something of the alert youthfulness with which she had met him when he first visited Boveyhayne, but when she came into the hall, a book in her hand, he felt that there was some stiffness in her manner, a self-consciousness which had not been there before.

"How do you do?" she said, offering her hand to him like any well-bred girl.

She did not call him "Quinny" or show in her manner or speech that he was particularly welcome to her.

"I suppose," he thought to himself, "she's cross because I didn't answer her letter!"

He resolved that he would bring her back to her old friendliness....

"I expect you're tired," she said. "We'll have tea in a minute or two. Mother's lying down. She's not very well!"

She would have said as much to a casual acquaintance, Henry thought.

"Not well!" he heard Ninian saying. "What's the matter with her?"

"She's tired. I think she's got a headache. There was a letter from Uncle Peter!" Mary answered, and her tone indicated that the letter from Uncle Peter accounted for everything.

"Oh!" said Ninian, scowling and turning away.

They went into the drawing-room to tea, and Henry had a sense of intruding on family affairs, mingled with his disappointment because Mary was not as he had expected her to be. It might be, of course, that the letter from Uncle Peter had affected Mary almost as much as it seemed to have affected Mrs. Graham, and that presently she would be as natural as she had been that other time ... but then he remembered that Gilbert had said that she was "being very femaley at present." She poured out tea for them as if she were a new governess, and she reproved Ninian once for saying "Damn!" when he dropped his bread and butter....

"Mary's turned pi!" said Ninian.

She frowned at him and told him not to be silly.

"She calls the Communion Service the Eucharist, and crosses herself and flops and bows!..."

"You're very absurd, Ninian!" she said.

Almost unconsciously, he began to compare her to Sheila Morgan. He remembered the free, natural ways of Sheila, and liked them better than these new, mannered ways of Mary. How could any one prefer this stiltedness to that ease, this self-consciousness to that state of being unaware of self?... In Belfast, when he had left John Marsh, and in his loneliness had thought of the way Sheila had humiliated him, he had had a sharp sense of revulsion from her, a loathing for her, a desire never to see her again; but now, sitting here looking at Mary and oppressed by her youngladyishness, his longing for Sheila came back to him with greater strength, and he resolved that he would write to her that night and beg her to forgive him for his cowardice and let him be her sweetheart again....

"Will you have some more tea!" Mary was saying to him, and he started at the sound of her voice.

"Oh, thanks!" he said, passing his cup to her.

"Thinking, Quinny?" Gilbert exclaimed, reaching for a bun.

"Eh? Oh, yes! I was thinking!" he answered. "What time does the evening post go out?" he said to Ninian.

"Six-twenty-five," Ninian answered.

"Thanks. I just want to write to Ireland!..."

"It'll get there just as soon if you post it to-morrow," said Gilbert.

Mary left them. "I'm going up to mother," she said, as she got up from the tea table. "She's awfully sorry she couldn't be down to welcome you," she added to Henry who had moved to open the door for her.

"I hope she'll soon be better," he answered.

When she had gone, Ninian got up and cursed lustily.

"Damn and blast him," he said.

They did not speak. They knew that Ninian's anger had some relation to Mrs. Graham's headache and the letter from Uncle Peter, and they felt that it was not their business to speak, even though Ninian had drawn them into the affair.

"I'm sorry," said Ninian, sitting down again. "I ought not to have broken out like that before you chaps, but I couldn't help it."

Henry coughed as if he were clearing his throat, but he did not speak, and Gilbert sat still and gazed at the toe of his shoe.

"He always upsets mother, damn him!" Ninian looked up at them. "My Uncle Peter married a girl in a confectioner's shop at Cambridge. He's that kind of ass! He never writes to mother except when he's in a mess, and he always expects her to get him out of it. I can't stand a man who does that sort of thing. She's an awful bitch, too ... his wife! We had them here once!... My God!"

Ninian lay back in his seat and remained silent for a while as if he were contemplating in his mind the picture of Uncle Peter and his wife on that awful visit to Boveyhayne. They waited for him to continue.

"I used to feel ashamed to go into the village," he said at last. "The way she talked to the fishermen—one minute snubbing them, and the next, talking to them as if she were a servant-girl. They didn't like it. Jim Rattenbury hated it, I know. She wasn't one of us and she wasn't one of them. A damned in-between, that's what she was. And Uncle Peter used to get drunk!... I'm awfully sorry, you chaps, I oughtn't to be boring you like this!"

"That's all right," said Gilbert.

"I was jolly glad when they went," Ninian went on. "Jolly glad! Poor mother had a hell of a time while they were here!"

"I suppose so," Henry murmured, hardly knowing what to say.

"I can't understand a man marrying a woman like that," Ninian said. "I mean, I can understand a fellow ragging about with a girl, but I can't understand him marrying her and ... and upsetting things!"

It was on the tip of Henry's tongue to say something about Ninian's belief in democracy, for he remembered that Gilbert, in one of his letters, had declared that Ninian had become a I'm-as-good-as-you-and-a-damn-sight-better-politician, but he did not say it.

"The girl isn't happy. Anybody can see she isn't happy, and Uncle Peter isn't happy, and between them they make us damn miserable. That kind of marriage is bound to fail, I think. People ought to marry in their own class!..."

"Unless they're big enough to climb out of it," said Gilbert.

"She isn't!"

It came to Henry suddenly that he was proposing to do what Ninian's Uncle Peter had done: marry a girl who was not of his class. He listened to Ninian and Gilbert as they talked of this intimate mingling of classes, and wondered what they would say if they knew of Sheila. Gilbert and Ninian were agreed that on the whole it was foolish for a man to marry that kind of girl. "It doesn't work," said Gilbert, and he told a story of a man whom his father had known, an officer in the Indian army who developed communist beliefs when he retired and had married his cook. "It's a ghastly failure," said Gilbert.

"I'm all for equality," Ninian said, "but it's silly to think that we're always equal now. We're not!..."

"And never will be," Gilbert interjected.

"I don't agree with you, Gilbert. I think that things like habits and manners can be fairly equalised!..."

"Minds can't!"

"No, of course not; but decent behaviour can, and it's silly to start mingling classes until you've done that. You rub each other the wrong way over little things that don't really matter, but that irritate like blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me off that kind of thing!"

It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not make a man feel ashamed!...

He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.

"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ... that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse. Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to them. I wish to God talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a prig!..."

He broke off almost angrily.

"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"

"But it's true all the same," he went on when they got outside, almost as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not, we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry, you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."

They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying there....

"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"

"Not always," Henry replied.

"Nearly always," said Gilbert.

"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.

6

He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend, and he saw that her look was brighter.

"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down the stairs again. "It's unlucky to pass people on the stairs. Don't you know that?"

He descended again as she bade him, laughing as he did so, and waited until she had come down.

"Mother's much better now," she said when she had reached his side. "She's coming down to dinner."

"I'm awfully glad," he replied. He hesitated for a second or two, standing with one foot on the last step of the stairs. "I say, Mary," he said.

"Yes, Quinny!" she answered, turning to him.

So she had not forgotten that she had called him by his nick-name.

"I say, Mary," he said again, still undecided as to whether he should speak his mind or not.

"Yes?" she repeated.

He went up a step or two of the stairs. "Oh, I don't know," he exclaimed. "I only wanted to say how nice it is to be here again!"

"Oh, yes!" Mary said, and he imagined that her tone was one of disappointment.

"I'll be down presently," he went on, and then he ran up the stairs to his room.

"I don't know," he said to himself, as he closed his door. "I'm damned if I know!"

He sat down at the writing-table and spread a sheet of notepaper in front of him. "I wish I knew!..." he murmured, and he wrote down the date. "Mary is awfully nice, and I like her of course, but Sheila!..."

He put the pen down again and sat back in his chair and stared out of the window. Out in the farmyard, he could hear the men bedding the horses, and there was a clatter of cans from the dairy where the women were turning the milk into cream. He could hear a horse whinnying in its stall ... and as he listened he seemed to see Sheila, as he had seen her on her uncle's farm before he had failed in courage, standing outside the byre with a crock in her hands and a queer, teasing look in her eyes. "You're the quare wee fella!" she was saying, and then, "I like you quaren well!..."

He seized the pen again and began to write.

7

He had almost finished the letter when Gilbert knocked on his door and shouted, "Can I come in, Quinny?"

He put the letter under the blotting paper, and called, "Yes, Gilbert!" in reply.

"Aren't you ready yet?" Gilbert asked.

"No, not yet, but I won't be long changing!"

"Righto!" said Gilbert, going to the other window and looking across the fields. "Rum go about Ninian's uncle, isn't it?" he said, playing with the tassle of the blind.

"Eh?" said Henry.

"There must be something low in a man who marries a woman like that, don't you think?"

"Oh, I don't know. Why should there be?"

"Obvious, isn't it? I mean, there can't be much in common otherwise, can there? Unless the man's a sentimental ass. It's as if you or I were to marry one of the girls out there in the yard, milking the cows. She'd be awfully useful for that job ... milking cows ... but you wouldn't want her to be doing it all the time. It depends, I suppose, on what you want to do. If you've got any ambition!..."

He did not finish the sentence, but Henry understood and nodded his head as if he agreed with him.

"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door. "I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?"

"No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?"

"No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room.

Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear Ninian, half laughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old ass, Mary!"

He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the hall.

"Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and put it in the waste-paper basket.

8

They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her.

"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.

"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"

And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"

He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never "had it out" with her.

"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."

"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought. "Something that will ... explain everything!"

Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."

He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and the journey to Dublin was to be the beginning of another; and he did not wish to end the one life or begin the other. He could feel growing within him, an extraordinary hatred of Trinity College, and he almost wrote to his father to say that he would rather not go to a University at all than go to T. C. D. It was cruel, he told himself, to separate him from his friends and compel him to go to a college that meant nothing on earth to him.

"I shan't know any one there," he said to Gilbert and Ninian, "and I probably won't want to know any one. It's a hole, that's what it is, a rotten hole. If the dons were any good, they'd be at Oxford or Cambridge!..."