There was a young moon in the southwest-a slender tracery in the April twilight-curved high over his right shoulder as he walked northward and homeward through the flare of Broadway.

His thoughts were still occupied with the pleasant excitement of his encounter with Thessalie Dunois; his mind and heart still responded to the delightful stimulation.  Out of an already half-forgotten realm of romance, where, often now, he found it increasingly difficult to realise that he had lived for five happy years, a young girl had suddenly emerged as bodily witness, to corroborate, revive, and refresh his fading faith in the reality of what once had been.

Five years in France!-France with its clear sun and lovely moon; its silver-grey cities, its lilac haze, its sweet, deep greenness, its atmosphere of living light!-France, the dwelling-place of God in all His myriad aspects-in all His protean forms!  France, the sanctuary of Truth and all her ancient and her future liberties; France, blossoming domain of Love in Love’s million exquisite transfigurations, wherein only the eye of faith can recognise the winged god amid his camouflage!

Wine-strong winds of the Western World, and a pitiless Western sun which etches every contour with terrible precision, leaving nothing to imagination-no delicate mystery to rest and shelter souls-had swept away and partly erased from his mind the actuality of those five past years.

Already that past, of which he had been a part, was becoming disturbingly unreal to him.  Phantoms haunted its ever-paling sunlight; its scenes were fading; its voices grew vague and distant; its hushed laughter dwindled to a whisper, dying like a sigh.

Then, suddenly, against that misty tapestry of tinted spectres, appeared Thessalie Dunois in the flesh!-straight out of the phantom-haunted void had stepped this glowing thing of life!  Into the raw reek and familiar dissonance of Broadway she had vanished.  Small wonder that he had followed her to keep in touch with the vanishing past, as a sleeper, waking against his will, strives still to grasp the fragile fabric of a happy dream.

Yet, in spite of Thessalie, in spite of dreams, in spite of his own home-coming, and the touch of familiar pavements under his own feet, the past, to Barres, was utterly dead, the present strange and unreal, the future obscure and all aflame behind a world afire with war.

For two years, now, no human mind in America had been able to adjust itself to the new heaven and the new earth which had sprung into lurid being at the thunderclap of war.

All things familiar had changed in the twinkling of an eye; all former things had passed away, leaving the stunned brain of humanity dulled under the shock.

Slowly, by degrees, the world was beginning to realise that the civilisation of Christ was being menaced once again by a resurgence from that ancient land of legend where the wild Hun denned;-that again the endless hordes of barbarians were rushing in on Europe out of their Eastern fastnesses-hordes which filled the shrinking skies with their clamour, vaunting the might of Baal, cheering their antichrist, drenching the knees of their own red gods with the blood of little children.

It seemed impossible for Americans to understand that these things could be-were really true-that the horrors the papers printed were actualities happening to civilised people like themselves and their neighbours.

Out of their own mouths the German tribes thundered their own disgrace and condemnation, yet America sat dazed, incredulous, motionless.  Emperor and general, professor and junker, shouted at the top of their lungs the new creed, horrible as the Black Mass, reversing every precept taught by Christ.

Millions of Teuton mouths cheered fiercely for the new religion-Frightfulness; worshipped with frantic yells the new trinity-Wotan, Kaiser and Brute Strength.

Stunned, blinded, deafened, the Western World, still half-paralysed, stirred stiffly from its inertia.  Slowly, mechanically, its arteries resumed their functions; the reflex, operating automatically, started trade again in its old channels; old habits were timidly resumed; minds groped backward, searching for severed threads which connected yesterday with to-day-groped, hunted, found nothing, and, perplexed, turned slowly toward the smoke-choked future for some reason for it all-some outlook.

There was no explanation, no outlook-nothing save dust and flame and the din of Teutonic hordes trampling to death the Son of Man.

So America moved about her worn, deep-trodden and familiar ways, her mind slowly clearing from the cataclysmic concussion, her power of vision gradually returning, adjusting itself, little by little, to this new heaven and new earth and this hell entirely new.

The Lusitania went down; the Great Republic merely quivered.  Other ships followed; only a low murmur of pain came from the Western Colossus.

But now, after the second year, through the thickening nightmare the Great Republic groaned aloud; and a new note of menace sounded in her drugged and dreary voice.

And the thick ears of the Hun twitched and he paused, squatting belly-deep in blood, to listen.

Barres walked homeward.  Somewhere along in the 40’s he turned eastward into one of those cross-streets originally built up of brownstone dwelling houses, and now in process of transformation into that architectural and commercial miscellany which marks the transition stage of the metropolis anywhere from Westchester to the sea.

Altered for business purposes, basements displayed signs and merchandise of bootmakers, dealers in oriental porcelains, rare prints, silverware; parlour windows modified into bay windows, sheeted with plate-glass, exposed, perhaps, feminine headgear, or an expensive model gown or two, or the sign of a real-estate man, or of an upholsterer.

Above the parlour floors lived people of one sort or another; furnished and unfurnished rooms and suites prevailed; and the brownstone monotony was already indented along the building line by brand-new constructions of Indiana limestone, behind the glittering plate-glass of which were to be seen reticent displays of artistic furniture, modern and antique oil paintings, here and there the lace-curtained den of some superior ladies’ hair-dresser, where beautifying also was accomplished at a price, alas!

Halfway between Sixth Avenue and Fifth, on the north side of the street, an enterprising architect had purchased half a dozen squatty, three-storied houses, set back from the sidewalk behind grass-plots.  These had been lavishly stuccoed and transformed into abodes for those irregulars in the army of life known as “artists.”

In the rear the back fences had been levelled; six corresponding houses on the next street had been purchased; a sort of inner court established, with a common grass-plot planted with trees and embellished by a number of concrete works of art, battered statues, sundials, and well-curbs.

Always the army of civilisation trudges along screened, flanked, and tagged after by life’s irregulars, who cannot or will not conform to routine.  And these are always roaming around seeking their own cantonments, where, for a while, they seem content to dwell at the end of one more aimless étape through the world-not in regulation barracks, but in regions too unconventional, too inconvenient to attract others.

Of this sort was the collection of squatty houses, forming a “community,” where, in the neighbourhood of other irregulars, Garret Barres dwelt; and into the lighted entrance of which he now turned, still exhilarated by his meeting with Thessalie Dunois.

The architectural agglomeration was known as Dragon Court-a faience Fu-dog above the electric light over the green entrance door furnishing that priceless idea-a Fu-dog now veiled by mesh-wire to provide against the indiscretions of sparrows lured thither by housekeeping possibilities lurking among the dense screens of Japanese ivy covering the façade.

Larry Soane, the irresponsible superintendent, always turned gardener with April’s advent in Dragon Court, contributions from its denizens enabling him to pepper a few flower-beds with hyacinths and tulips, and later with geraniums.  These former bulbs had now gratefully appeared in promising thickets, and Barres saw the dark form of the handsome, reckless-looking Irishman fussing over them in the lantern-lit dusk, while his little daughter, Dulcie, kneeling on the dim grass, caressed the first blue hyacinth blossom with thin, childish fingers.

Barres glanced into his letter-box behind the desk, above which a drop-light threw more shadows than illumination.  Little Dulcie Soane was supposed to sit under it and emit information, deliver and receive letters, pay charges on packages, and generally supervise things when she was not attending school.

There were no letters for the young man.  He examined a package, found it contained his collars from the laundry, tucked them under his left arm, and walked to the door looking out upon the dusky interior court.

“Soane,” he said, “your garden begins to look very fine.”  He nodded pleasantly to Dulcie, and the child responded to his friendly greeting with the tired but dauntless smile of the young who are missing those golden years to which all childhood has a claim.

Dulcie’s three cats came strolling out of the dusk across the lamplit grass-a coal black one with sea-green eyes, known as “The Prophet,” and his platonic mate, white as snow, and with magnificent azure-blue eyes which, in white cats, usually betokens total deafness.  She was known as “The Houri” to the irregulars of Dragon Court.  The third cat, unanimously but misleadingly christened “Strindberg” by the dwellers in Dragon Court, has already crooked her tortoise-shell tail and was tearing around in eccentric circles or darting halfway up trees in a manner characteristic, and, possibly accounting for the name, if not for the sex.

“Thim cats of the kid’s,” observed Soane, “do be scratchin’ up the plants all night long-bad cess to thim!  Barrin’ thim three omadhauns yonder, I’d show ye a purty bed o’ poisies, Misther Barres.  But Sthrin’berg, God help her, is f’r diggin’ through to China.”

Dulcie impulsively caressed the Prophet, who turned his solemn, incandescent eyes on Barres.  The Houri also looked at him, then, intoxicated by the soft spring evening, rolled lithely upon the new grass and lay there twitching her snowy tail and challenging the stars out of eyes that matched their brilliance.

Dulcie got up and walked slowly across the grass to where Barres stood: 

“May I come to see you this evening?” she asked, diffidently, and with a swift, sidelong glance toward her father.

“Ah, then, don’t be worritin’ him!” grumbled Soane.  “Hasn’t Misther Barres enough to do, what with all thim idées he has slitherin’ in his head, an’ all the books an’ learnin’ an’ picters he has to think of-whithout the likes of you at his heels every blessed minute, day an’ night! -”

“But he always lets me-” she remonstrated.

“G’wan, now, and lave the poor gentleman be!  Quit your futtherin’ an’ muttherin’.  G’wan in the house, ye little scut, an’ see what there is f’r ye to do! -”

“What’s the matter with you, Soane?” interrupted Barres good-humouredly.  “Of course she can come up if she wants to.  Do you feel like paying me a visit, Dulcie, before you go to bed?”

“Yes,” she nodded diffidently.

“Well, come ahead then, Sweetness!  And whenever you want to come you say so.  Your father knows well enough I like to have you.”

He smiled at Dulcie; the child’s shy preference for his society always had amused him.  Besides, she was always docile and obedient; and she was very sensitive, too, never outwearing her welcome in his studio, and always leaving without a murmur when, looking up from book or drawing he would exclaim cheerfully:  “Now, Sweetness!  Time’s up!  Bed for yours, little lady!”

It had been a very gradual acquaintance between them-more than two years in developing.  From his first pleasant nod to her when he first came to live in Dragon Court, it had progressed for a few months, conservatively on her part, and on his with a detached but kindly interest born of easy sympathy for youth and loneliness.

But he had no idea of the passionate response he was stirring in the motherless, neglected child-of what hunger he was carelessly stimulating, what latent qualities and dormant characteristics he was arousing.

Her appearance, one evening, in her night-dress at his studio doorway, accompanied by her three cats, began to enlighten him in regard to her mental starvation.  Tremulous, almost at the point of tears, she had asked for a book and permission to remain for a few moments in the studio.  He had rung for Selinda, ordered fruit, cake, and a glass of milk, and had installed Dulcie upon the sofa with a lapful of books.  That was the beginning.

But Barres still did not entirely understand what particular magnet drew the child to his studio.  The place was full of beautiful things, books, rugs, pictures, fine old furniture, cabinets glimmering with porcelains, ivories, jades, Chinese crystals.  These all, in minutest detail, seemed to fascinate the girl.  Yet, after giving her permission to enter whenever she desired, often while reading or absorbed in other affairs, he became conscious of being watched; and, glancing up, would frequently surprise her sitting there very silently, with an open book on her knees, and her strange grey eyes intently fixed on him.

Then he would always smile and say something friendly; and usually forget her the next moment in his absorption of whatever work he had under way.

Only one other man inhabiting Dragon Court ever took the trouble to notice or speak to the child-James Westmore, the sculptor.  And he was very friendly in his vigorous, jolly, rather boisterous way, catching her up and tossing her about as gaily and irresponsibly as though she were a rag doll; and always telling her he was her adopted godfather and would have to chastise her if she ever deserved it.  Also, he was always urging her to hurry and grow up, because he had a wedding present for her.  And though Dulcie’s smile was friendly, and Westmore’s nonsense pleased the shy child, she merely submitted, never made any advance.

Barres’s ménage was accomplished by two specimens of mankind, totally opposite in sex and colour; Selinda, a blonde, slant-eyed, and very trim Finn, doing duty as maid; and Aristocrates W. Johnson, lately employed in the capacity of waiter on a dining-car by the New York Central Railroad-tall, dignified, graceful, and Ethiopian-who cooked as daintily as a debutante trifling with culinary duty, and served at table with the languid condescension of a dilettante and wealthy amateur of domestic arts.

Barres ascended the two low, easy flights of stairs and unlocked his door.  Aristocrates, setting the table in the dining-room, approached gracefully and relieved his master of hat, coat, and stick.

Half an hour later, a bath and fresh linen keyed up his already lively spirits; he whistled while he tied his tie, took a critical look at himself, and, dropping both hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket, walked out into the big studio, which also was his living-room.

There was a piano there; he sat down and rattled off a rollicking air from the most recent spring production, beginning to realise that he was keyed up for something livelier than a solitary dinner at home.

His hands fell from the keys and he swung around on the piano stool and looked into the dining-room rather doubtfully.

“Aristocrates!” he called.

The tall pullman butler sauntered gracefully in.

Barres gave him a telephone number to call.  Aristocrates returned presently with the information that the lady was not at home.

“All right.  Try Amsterdam 6703.  Ask for Miss Souval.”

But Miss Souval, also, was out.

Barres possessed a red-leather covered note-book; he went to his desk and got it; and under his direction Aristocrates called up several numbers, reporting adversely in every case.

It was a fine evening; ladies were abroad or preparing to fulfil engagements wisely made on such a day as this had been.  And the more numbers he called up the lonelier the young man began to feel.

Thessalie had not given him either her address or telephone number.  It would have been charming to have her dine with him.  He was now thoroughly inclined for company.  He glanced at the empty dining-room with aversion.

“All right; never mind,” he said, dismissing Aristocrates, who receded as lithely as though leading a cake-walk.

“The devil,” muttered the young fellow.  “I’m not going to dine here alone.  I’ve had too happy a day of it.”

He got up restlessly and began to pace the studio.  He knew he could get some man, but he didn’t want one.  However, it began to look like that or a solitary dinner.

So after a few more moments’ scowling cogitation he went out and down the stairs, with the vague idea of inviting some brother painter-any one of the regular irregulars who inhabited Dragon Court.

Dulcie sat behind the little desk near the door, head bowed, her thin hands clasped over the closed ledger, and in her pallid face the expressionless dullness of a child forgotten.

“Hello, Sweetness!” he said cheerfully.

She looked up; a slight colour tinted her cheeks, and she smiled.

“What’s the matter, Dulcie?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?  That’s a very dreary malady-nothing.  You look lonely.  Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know whether you are lonely or not?” he demanded.

“I suppose I am,” she ventured, with a shy smile.

“Where is your father?”

“He went out.”

“Any letters for me-or messages?”

“A man-he had one eye-came.  He asked who you are.”

“What?”

“I think he was German.  He had only one eye.  He asked your name.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him.  Then he went away.”

Barres shrugged: 

“Somebody who wants to sell artists’ materials,” he concluded.  Then he looked at the girl:  “So you’re lonely, are you?  Where are your three cats?  Aren’t they company for you?”

“Yes....”

“Well, then,” he said gaily, “why not give a party for them?  That ought to amuse you, Dulcie.”

The child still smiled; Barres walked on past her a pace or two, halted, turned irresolutely, arrived at some swift decision, and came back, suddenly understanding that he need seek no further-that he had discovered his guest of the evening at his very elbow.

“Did you and your father have your supper, Dulcie?”

“My father went out to eat at Grogan’s.”

“How about you?”

“I can find something.”

“Why not dine with me?” he suggested.

The child stared, bewildered, then went a little pale.

“Shall we have a dinner party for two-you and I, Dulcie?  What do you say?”

She said nothing, but her big grey eyes were fixed on him in a passion of inquiry.

“A real party,” he repeated.  “Let the people get their own mail and packages until your father returns.  Nobody’s going to sneak in, anyway.  Or, if that won’t do, I’ll call up Grogan’s and tell your father to come back because you are going to dine in my studio with me.  Do you know the telephone number?  Very well; get Grogan’s for me.  I’ll speak to your father.”

Dulcie’s hand trembled on the receiver as she called up Grogan’s; Barres bent over the transmitter: 

“Soane, Dulcie is going to take dinner in my studio with me.  You’ll have to come back on duty, when you’ve eaten.”  He hung up, looked at Dulcie and laughed.

“I wanted company as much as you did,” he confessed.  “Now, go and put on your prettiest frock, and we’ll be very grand and magnificent.  And afterward we’ll talk and look at books and pretty things-and maybe we’ll turn on the Victrola and I’ll teach you to dance-” He had already begun to ascend the stairs: 

“In half an hour, Dulcie!” he called back; “-and you may bring the Prophet if you like....  Shall I ask Mr. Westmore to join us?”

“I’d rather be all alone with you,” she said shyly.

He laughed and ran on up the stairs.

In half an hour the electric bell rang very timidly.  Aristocrates, having been instructed and rehearsed, and, loftily condescending to his rôle in a kindly comedy to be played seriously, announced:  “Miss Soane!” in his most courtly manner.

Barres threw aside the evening paper and came forward, taking both hands of the white and slightly frightened child.

“Aristocrates ought to have announced the Prophet, too,” he said gaily, breaking the ice and swinging Dulcie around to face the open door again.

The Prophet entered, perfectly at ease, his eyes of living jade shining, his tail urbanely hoisted.

Dulcie ventured to smile; Barres laughed outright; Aristocrates surveyed the Prophet with toleration mingled with a certain respect.  For a black cat is never without occult significance to a gentleman of colour.

With Dulcie’s hand still in his, Barres led her into the living-room, where, presently, Aristocrates brought a silver tray upon which was a glass of iced orange juice for Dulcie, and a “Bronnix,” as Aristocrates called it, for the master.

“To your health and good fortune in life, Dulcie,” he said politely.

The child gazed mutely at him over her glass, then, blushing, ventured to taste her orange juice.

When she finished, Barres drew her frail arm through his and took her out, seating her.  Ceremonies began in silence, and the master of the place was not quite sure whether the flush on Dulcie’s face indicated unhappy embarrassment or pleasure.

He need not have worried:  the child adored it all.  The Prophet came in and gravely seated himself on a neighbouring chair, whence he could survey the table and seriously inspect each course.

“Dulcie,” he said, “how grown-up you look with your bobbed hair put up, and your fluffy gown.”

She lifted her enchanted eyes to him: 

“It is my first communion dress....  I’ve had to make it longer for a graduation dress.”

“Oh, that’s so; you’re graduating this summer!”

“Yes.”

“And what then?”

“Nothing.”  She sighed unconsciously and sat very still with folded hands, while Aristocrates refilled her glass of water.

She no longer felt embarrassed; her gravity matched Aristocrates’s; she seriously accepted whatever was offered or set before her, but Barres noticed that she ate it all, merely leaving on her plate, with inculcated and mathematical precision, a small portion as concession to good manners.

They had, toward the banquet’s end, water ices, bon-bons, French pastry, and ice cream.  And presently a slight and blissful sigh of repletion escaped the child’s red lips.  The symptoms were satisfactory but unmistakable; Dulcie was perfectly feminine; her capacity had proven it.

The Prophet’s stately self-control in the fragrant vicinity of nourishment was now to be rewarded:  Barres conducted Dulcie to the studio and installed her among cushions upon a huge sofa.  Then, lighting a cigarette, he dropped down beside her and crossed one knee over the other.

“Dulcie,” he said in his lazy, humorous way, “it’s a funny old world any way you view it.”

“Do you think it is always funny?” inquired the child, her deep, grey eyes on his face.

He smiled: 

“Yes, I do; but sometimes the joke in on one’s self.  And then, although it is still a funny world, from the world’s point of view, you, of course, fail to see the humour of it....  I don’t suppose you understand.”

“I do,” nodded the child, with the ghost of a smile.

“Really?  Well, I was afraid I’d been talking nonsense, but if you understand, it’s all right.”

They both laughed.

“Do you want to look at some books?” he suggested.

“I’d rather listen to you.”

He smiled: 

“All right.  I’ll begin at this corner of the room and tell you about the things in it.”  And for a while he rambled lazily on about old French chairs and Spanish chests, and the panels of Mille Fleur tapestry which hung behind them; the two lovely pre-Raphael panels in their exquisite ancient frames; the old Venetian velvet covering triple choir-stalls in the corner; the ivory-toned marble figure on its wood and compos pedestal, where tendrils and delicate foliations of water gilt had become slightly irridescent, harmonising with the patine on the ancient Chinese garniture flanking a mantel clock of dullest gold.

About these things, their workmanship, the histories of their times, he told her in his easy, unaccented voice, glancing sideways at her from time to time to note how she stood it.

But she listened, fascinated, her gaze moving from the object discussed to the man who discussed it; her slim limbs curled under her, her hands clasped around a silken cushion made from the robe of some Chinese princess.

Lounging there beside her, amused, humorously flattered by her attention, and perhaps a little touched, he held forth a little longer.

“Is it a nice party, so far, Dulcie?” he concluded with a smile.

She flushed, found no words, nodded, and sat with lowered head as though pondering.

“What would you rather do if you could do what you want to in the world, Dulcie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think a minute.”

She thought for a while.

“Live with you,” she said seriously.

“Oh, Dulcie!  That is no sort of ambition for a growing girl!” he laughed; and she laughed, too, watching his every expression out of grey eyes that were her chiefest beauty.

“You’re a little too young to know what you want yet,” he concluded, still smiling.  “By the time that bobbed mop of red hair grows to a proper length, you’ll know more about yourself.”

“Do you like it up?” she enquired naively.

“It makes you look older.”

“I want it to.”

“I suppose so,” he nodded, noticing the snowy neck which the new coiffure revealed.  It was becoming evident to him that Dulcie had her own vanities-little pathetic vanities which touched him as he glanced at the reconstructed first communion dress and the drooping hyacinth pinned at the waist, and the cheap white slippers on a foot as slenderly constructed as her long and narrow hands.

“Did your mother die long ago, Dulcie?”

“Yes.”

“In America?”

“In Ireland.”

“You look like her, I fancy-” thinking of Soane.

“I don’t know.”

Barres had heard Soane hold forth in his cups on one or two occasions-nothing more than the vague garrulousness of a Celt made more loquacious by the whiskey of one Grogan-something about his having been a gamekeeper in his youth, and that his wife-“God rest her!”-might have held up her head with “anny wan o’ thim in th’ Big House.”

Recollecting this, he idly wondered what the story might have been-a young girl’s perverse infatuation for her father’s gamekeeper, perhaps-a handsome, common, ignorant youth, reckless and irresponsible enough to take advantage of her-probably some such story-resembling similar histories of chauffeurs, riding-masters, grooms, and coachmen at home.

The Prophet came noiselessly into the studio, stopped at sight of his little mistress, twitched his tail reflectively, then leaped onto a carved table and calmly began his ablutions.

Barres got up and wound up the Victrola.  Then he kicked aside a rug or two.

“This is to be a real party, you know,” he remarked.  “You don’t dance, do you?”

“Yes,” she said diffidently, “a little.”

“Oh!  That’s fine!” he exclaimed.

Dulcie got off the sofa, shook out her reconstructed gown.  When he came over to where she stood, she laid her hand in his almost solemnly, so overpowering had become the heavenly sequence of events.  For the rite of his hospitality had indeed become a rite to her.  Never before had she stood in awe, enthralled before such an altar as this man’s hearthstone.  Never had she dreamed that he who so wondrously served it could look at such an offering as hers-herself.

But the miracle had happened; altar and priest were accepting her; she laid her hand, which trembled, in his; gave herself to his guidance and to the celestial music, scarcely seeing, scarcely hearing his voice.

“You dance delightfully,” he was saying; “you’re a born dancer, Dulcie.  I do it fairly well myself, and I ought to know.”

He was really very much surprised.  He was enjoying it immensely.  When the Victrola gave up the ghost he wound it again and came back to resume.  Under his suggestions and tutelage, they tried more intricate steps, devious and ambitious, and Dulcie, unterrified by terpsichorean complications, surmounted every one with his whispered coaching and expert aid.

Now it came to a point where time was not for him.  He was too interested, enjoying it too genuinely.

Sometimes, when they paused to enable him to resurrect the defunct music in the Victrola, they laughed at the Prophet, who sat upon the ancient carved table, gravely surveying them.  Sometimes they rested because he thought she ought to-himself a trifle pumped-only to find, to his amazement, that he need not be solicitous concerning her.

A tall and ancient clock ringing midnight from clear, uncompromising bells, brought Barres to himself.

“Good Lord!” he exclaimed, “this won’t do!  Dear child, I’m having a wonderful time, but I’ve got to deliver you to your father!”

He drew her arm through his, laughingly pretending horror and haste; she fled lightly along beside him as he whisked her through the hall and down the stairs.

A candle burned on the desk.  Soane sat there, asleep, and odorous of alcohol, his flushed face buried in his arms.

But Soane was what is known as a “sob-souse”; never ugly in his cups, merely inclined to weep over the immemorial wrongs of Ireland.

He woke up when Barres touched his shoulder, rubbed his swollen eyes and black, curly head, gazed tragically at his daughter: 

“G’wan to bed, ye little scut!” he said, getting to his feet with a terrific yawn.

Barres took her hand: 

“We’ve had a wonderful party, haven’t we, Sweetness?”

“Yes,” whispered the child.

The next instant she was gone like a ghost, through the dusky, whitewashed corridor where distorted shadows trembled in the candlelight.

“Soane,” said Barres, “this won’t do, you know.  They’ll sack you if you keep on drinking.”

The man, not yet forty, a battered, middle-aged by-product of hale and reckless vigour, passed his hands over his temples with the dignity of a Hibernian Hamlet: 

“The harp that wanst through Tara’s halls-” he began; but memory failed; and two tears-by-products, also, of Grogan’s whiskey-sparkled in his reproachful eyes.

“I’m merely telling you,” remarked Barres.  “We all like you, Soane, but the landlord won’t stand for it.”

“May God forgive him,” muttered Soane.  “Was there ever a landlord but he was a tyrant, too?”

Barres blew out the candle; a faint light above the Fu-dog outside, over the street door, illuminated the stone hall.

“You ought to keep sober for your little daughter’s sake,” insisted Barres in a low voice.  “You love her, don’t you?”

“I do that!” said Soane-“God bless her and her poor mother, who could hould up her pretty head with anny wan till she tuk up with th’ like o’ me!”

His brogue always increased in his cups; devotion to Ireland and a lofty scorn of landlords grew with both.

“You’d better keep away from Grogan’s,” remarked Barres.

“I had a bite an’ a sup at Grogan’s.  Is there anny harrm in that, sorr?”

“Cut out the ‘sup,’ Larry.  Cut out that gang of bums at Grogan’s, too.  There are too many Germans hanging out around Grogan’s these days.  You Sinn Feiners or Clan-na-Gael, or whatever you are, had better manage your own affairs, anyway.  The old-time Feinans stood on their own sturdy legs, not on German beer-skids.”

“Wisha then, sorr, d’ye mind th’ ould song they sang in thim days: 

“Then up steps Bonyparty An’ takes me by the hand, And how is ould Ireland, And how does she shtand?  It’s a poor, disthressed country As ever yet was seen, And they’re hangin’ men and women For the wearing of the green!

  Oh, the wearing of the -”

“That’ll do,” said Barres drily.  “Do you want to wake the house?  Don’t go to Grogan’s and talk about Ireland to any Germans.  I’ll tell you why:  we’ll probably be at war with Germany ourselves within a year, and that’s a pretty good reason for you Irish to keep clear of all Germans.  Go to bed!”