anctuary?

The answer put him in a shiver of panic. Nothing!

He had no right, no title to it. Here he was drawing on to fifty, close
on forty-eight; and he had done, achieved, nothing. He had no wife, no
child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not
even a little song.

Section 2

Strange thing--it hadn't occurred to him at first; but it did now when
he thought over it in the winter evenings--was this: that Alan Donn
Campbell, for all that he was dead these six years and more, existed
still, was bigger now than he had ever been in life....

Because Shane had hated to see the fine boat drawn up, he had put _Righ
nam Bradan_, the _Salmon King_, Alan Donn's great thirty-footer, into
commission, and raced her at Ballycastle and Kingstown, losing both
times. He had ascribed it to sailing luck, the dying of a breeze, the
setting of a tide, a lucky tack of an opposing boat. But at Cowes he
should have won. Everything was with him. He came in fifth.

"I can't understand," he told one of Alan's old crew.

"Man," the Antrim sailor told him bluntly, "ye have na' the gift."

"But, Feardoracha, I'm a sailor."

"Aye, Shane Campbell, you're that. For five times seven years you've
sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn
had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for
the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, _Shane na
fairrge_, there's few Alan Donns."

And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old
man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn,
there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white
fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the
line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power
he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was
his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of
time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan
Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was
fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling
mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes
gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece
of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with
matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....

He lived becau