voices; his in limping, stilted narrative, hers in encouraging assent.

It was a story no man has the right to tell. Told to a woman, it set the blood racing in my veins till it tingled hot and furious in my very fingers. It seemed he had been to the West Indies, trading in what I don't know and care less. And there, no doubt, with what we call the superiority of our European civilization, he had captured the affections of a planter's daughter.

I caught her name, just her Christian name, as he disclosed it. Clarissa—only Clarissa—I heard no more. He was one of those youths who must give you names to make his story true. And how Clarissa loved him! Behind all his boasting and that barking laugh of his, I could see how well she loved him too. Could it have been anything but love that had brought her from her sunny islands to that grey land of Ireland where he had taken her?

I thought of Mary Queen of Scots, exiled from her golden France to those dim mists of Scotland, the greatest tragedy the world has ever seen. Only the need of history to make this as great a tragedy as well.

In the care of his two aunts he had placed her.

"And there she'll have to stay for some time. She wants educating," said he, and forthwith he proceeded to recount her little ignorances, her little follies, her little mistakes, at each of which he threw back his head and laughed.

"She knows nothing," he continued; "not that I think a woman ought to know much. But she knows absolutely nothing. I had thoughts of her coming over here to school. But she's too old for that; besides, she's nicely tucked away there in Ballysheen."

The name struck quickly on my ears. Ballysheen? Why was it familiar? One of those tricks of sense, perhaps. You know an Irish name anywhere. But I had no inclination then to follow it out. I beckoned my waiter for another Kümmel. My empty glass betokened idleness. I could see the woman's eyes wandering in my direction. The man would never have suspected me of listening, for when a man tells a story, the sound of it absorbs him. Women, I find, are different to that. They are ever aware of the thousand things about them.

"How is she going to be taught?" she asked when her suspicions were allayed by the filling of my glass.

He inhaled deeply of his cigarette and slowly blew out the smoke between pursed lips. "Oh—they'll teach her," said he.

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