"Oh—all sorts of stories. Tierney told me the other day—Tierney is our town-councillor and plumber. As a human being he lets the drains get into disorder—as a town-councillor he gives himself the contract to see to them, and as a plumber he partly puts them right. You ought to meet him. But he told me that she was a black from the West Indies."

"How did he know that?" I asked, quickly, and the next moment I saw how my words must imply knowledge to her.

"He doesn't know it," said she. "Why should he? Isn't it when people don't know things that they talk about them?"

I laughed. If she applies that little piece of wisdom to me who say nothing, can there be any doubt but that she guesses at the truth?

"But what makes your friend Tierney suppose anything so extravagant as a black from the West Indies?" I asked.

She raised her eye-brows, which, in its way, is just as expressive as shrugging one's shoulders.

"I think the Miss Fennells have given it out that she comes from America, and if you think of the veil she wears always and the fact that no one in Ballysheen has ever seen her face, you've got enough to make people in a small Irish village say far more extravagant things than that. Mind you, I don't believe what Tierney says. I shouldn't be a bit surprised to find that she is beautiful."

That very nearly drew me; but not quite. I know she is beautiful. Not because I have that young man's word for it. I see her beautiful, as that type nearly always is. Every time the name Clarissa finds its way into my thoughts, there creeps in with it a picture which eludes all description of outline. I see a dim vision of deep dark eyes set in that faint blue-white—the white of old china he called it. God knows I thank him for nothing, unless it be for that. She has an olive skin, so tenderly touched with those southern suns that ivory might match it. Her mouth is sad, for when the God of a Thousand Circumstances takes a woman in His grasp, He lets fall two drops of sorrow in her eyes and moulds her lips to His own making. Then her hair I know is black; but in the blackness of it I can see a light of brown as though it once had caught a sun ray in its net and caged it there for ever.

More clear a vision than this, the picture of Clarissa denies me. I shall know her no better when I see her face than I know her already now; yet something dreads me to think of that first moment when she removes her veil. 

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