It was Katrine's turn to be bewildered.

"I never heard of Ramazan," she said. "Where is it?"

"And he was not present at your father's marriage in Italy?"

Katrine shook her head; but to Ravenel's astonishment she began to wear an amused smile as he repeated McDermott's tale to her bit by bit.

"I understand," she explained, "my father saved him from a horrible attack of the measles in New York. They thought for weeks that he would die."

"But why," Frank demanded, "didn't he say just that?"

"He couldn't!" Katrine stated, as simply and uncritically as a child. "You see, he has the soul of an artist, and there's something about a man of thirty dying of measles impossible for the artistic temperament to contemplate. Ah!" she said, with gentle pleading in her voice for an absent friend, "he's the greatest liar as well as the most truthful person alive; but you've got to be Irish to understand how that thing can be. He couldn't say my father saved him from the measles. The story of India sounds better—and no one is hurt. Can't ye understand? The gratitude for service rendered is the great thing; to remember a kindness has been done; and whether he gives as reason for his gratitude Ramazan or the measles, what is the difference? Do you know"—there came an apologetic look and blush to her face as she spoke, "that I myself, when it comes to things of the heart—" she ended the sentence with a laugh and a gesture of self-depreciation. "There was once a little child in Killybegs," she explained, "a girl, who wanted to be a boy, and she cried all of the time because she wasn't. So I told her she was a boy, and it comforted her for quite a year. You see, it made her happy."

"Oh," Francis laughed, "you incomprehensible Celts!"

"Incomprehensible, indeed!" she said. "Incomprehensible!"

A singing voice broke the talk, rolling strongly, vibrantly through the leaves, a lawless, insistent voice, and Dermott McDermott, with the reins loosened on his horse's neck, and his ardent eyes looking upward to heaven's blue, rode by the other side of the privet hedge:

"'War-battered dogs are we,

Fighters in every clime,

Fillers of trench and grave,

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