did not flee from anything.

[Pg 18]

Watching her, as she stood or sat or went, the wise Lavarcham used to lose her senses, for all that was beautiful was here gathered into one form, as in one true ray of the sun is all that is lovely of the sun. The running wind, and the wild creatures of the wood; the folk from the Shí, the Bochanachs and Bananocks, and the aerial beings that are not seen, might have stayed to look at Deirdre, but had they stayed they could not have gone again, for they would have become eyes only, and they would have perished in beauty, gazing on it.

Lavarcham was a wise woman. She could not have occupied and continued to hold her position in Conachúr’s household had she not been wise. She was known as the king’s “conversation-woman,” and she could indicate an unpleasant truth as delicately as a poet can express the dimple [Pg 19] in a lady’s chin. But her real occupation, masked by the courteous word, was that of household spy. She went to and fro in the vast palaces at Emania, and nothing passed there, whether among the nobles or the servants, that she was not privy to, or which the king was not thereafter acquainted with. She could adapt herself to any situation and to every society; and if her chatter with the kitchen-maids was jovial and in key, her conversation with a young princess or an old bard was not less balanced and elucidatory.

[Pg 19]

She had many things to teach a young girl, and she withheld no knowledge that could benefit the little one whom her heart had soon adopted as its own babe. The virtues as well as the arts were part of her experience, so that Deirdre grew in the love of chastity, of industry, and of joyfulness.

In this way and in these teachings the years went by, unnoticed as years. Day followed night, and night came after day in a timeless succession, each adding its unnoticeable little to her stature, its unseen tender curve to her limbs, its imperceptible deposit of memory to her mind.

But among the arts of which the tireless [Pg 20] Lavarcham spoke there was one she taught and retaught to Deirdre, and that art was Conachúr.

[Pg 20]

Although she had never seen the king, yet the young girl knew him as a mother knows her baby. She could have recited his babyhood, his adolescence, and now his maturity. She knew, as only Lavarcham did, why he did such a certain thing, and by what 

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