d he himself recognised that he had
spoken in a voice overloud, so that it had something almost of
brutality.

"Do I hurt you?" he continued. "I am sorry. But let me speak the whole
truth out, I cannot afford reticence, I want you to know the first and
last of it. I say now that I love you. Yes, but I could have said it
with equal truth five years ago. It is five years since your father
arrested me at the ferry down there on Lough Swilly, because I wished to
press on to Letterkenny and not delay a night by stopping with a
stranger. Five years since I first saw you, first heard the language of
your violin. I remember how you sat with your back towards me. The light
shone on your hair; I could just see your eyelashes and the colour of
your cheeks. I remember the sweep of your arm.... My dear, you are for
me; I am for you."

But she drew back from his outstretched hands.

"No," she said very gently, but with a decision he could not mistake.
She saw more clearly into his mind than he did himself. The restlessness
of the born traveller, the craving for the large and lonely spaces in
the outlandish corners of the world, the incurable intermittent fever to
be moving, ever moving amongst strange peoples and under strange
skies--these were deep-rooted qualities of the man. Passion might
obscure them for a while, but they would make their appeal in the end,
and the appeal would torture. The home would become a prison. Desires
would so clash within him, there could be no happiness. That was the
man. For herself, she looked down the slope of the hill across the brown
country. Away on the right waved the woods about Ramelton, at her feet
flashed a strip of the Lough; and this was her country; she was its
child and the sister of its people.

"No," she repeated, as she rose to her feet. Durrance rose with her. He
was still not so much disheartened as conscious of a blunder. He had put
his case badly; he should never have given her the opportunity to think
that marriage would be an interruption of his career.

"We will say good-bye here," she said, "in the open. We shall be none
the less good friends because three thousand miles hinder us from
shaking hands."

They shook hands as she spoke.

"I shall be in England again in a year's time," said Durrance. "May I
come back?"

Ethne's eyes and her smile consented.

"I should be sorry to lose you altogether," she said, "although even if
I did not see you, I should know that I ha