grateful?" I went on. "Do you really imagine that any woman is grateful to a rank outsider for breaking her heart? It will break her heart, you know. She's breaking it now, longing for her blue skies and her palm trees—but if we send her back there without him, it'll break her heart altogether. Yet that's what we shall have to do. We shall have to send her back again. What do you think about it all?"

Dandy yawned towards the fire, and the yellow flame danced higher than ever. At moments it looked as though it were going to leap up the chimney out of sight, yet always it came back into the heart of the fire once more like a spirit chained to the furnace.

Three days later there came a reply from Ballysheen.

"There's not a fish in the water," wrote Townshend. "But come all the same, you never know. Your company is as good as any twenty-pounder in the slackest of seasons." "What, is he lonely too?" I thought. "There are Miss Fennells here," the letter continued, "but for God's sake don't talk of them as old maiden ladies—Miss Emily wears an orange-colored wig, so they say in Ballysheen—and she would have you know that at thirty-seven a woman is in her prime. I don't promise you entertainment from them—but come anyway."

And I am going. I have just rung the bell for Moxon, and Dandy already is beginning to lift his nose to the scent of adventure in the wind.

CHAPTER V

When I woke up this morning—my first in Ballysheen—the sun was ablaze upon everything. Last evening I had driven over the nine miles from Youghal upon Quin's car. Quin is the local baker, doing odd jobs as a jobbing-master besides. Then the sky had been a sullen grey, no light or hope was there to be found in it as far as your eyes could see. Those long, lone, rutted roads were empty. Not a soul did we pass from the bridge over the Blackwater all the way to where the dense trees tunnel an entrance into the wee village of Ballysheen.

When

"Is it always as lonely as this over here?" I asked of Quin, whose eyes were set dreamily before him, as though in the little gap between the horse's ears he saw visions of a country we should never reach. "Are there never any people about on the roads?"

With a jerk he brought himself back into the present.

"Shure there are plenty of people in these parts," said he, "only they're in their cottages, the way 'tis 

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