ir, her eyes with the
black flecks in them, her young round breast, her bare fore-arm, as she
rocked Patsy O'Brien, were charming, and her cry, as Fairfax came in,
and the hands she pressed to her heart were no less charming.

She sprang up, her work fell to the floor: she stood deathly white and
trembling. Her emotion, her love, affected the young man very deeply. He
did not think of the obstacles between them, of her station, or of
anything as he came into Mrs. O'Brien's parlour-bedroom amongst her six
ubiquitous children and disturbed the cradle to get to Molly Shannon. He
thought of one fact only, that he had kissed her: how had he forgotten
the honey of it for a fortnight? Without so much as bidding her
good-morning, he repeated the ecstasy and kissed her. She had time to
grow faint and to regain her life in his arms, and under her happy
breath she whispered: "Ah, I must quiet Patsy. Ah, let me go, he'll hurt
his throat." And she bent, blooming and heart-breakingly happy, over the
cradle.

* * * * *

Mrs. Kenny called him as he went past the door. "Shure," she said, "I've
got bad news for ye, Misther Fairfax, dear."

He stopped on the threshold. "There is only one death on the earth that
could give me any pain, Mrs. Kenny. I reckon it's----"

"It's not death then," she hastened, "shure it's a little thing, but
poor Matty's that crazy that the child has gone out to her aunty's and
wurra a bit will she come home."

"Matty!" Fairfax exclaimed.

"Shure, the moniment in your bedroom, Misther Fairfax."

He flew upstairs. The corner inhabited for him by a fairy companion was
empty. The image of his talent, of his little love, of his heart's hope,
had disappeared. Mrs. Kenny did not follow him upstairs as one would
have supposed that she would do. He locked his door, the cloths lay in a
pile, damp and soggy. Why had they not left the fragments--the precious
morsels? His eyes filled with impotent, angry grief; he tore his table
drawer open and found the designs which he had made for the figure. The
sketches seemed crude and poor beside the finished work whose execution
had been inspired. This destruction unchained again his melancholy. He
was overwhelmed; the accident seemed like a brutal insistence of
Destiny, and he seemed bound to the coarse, hard existence to which he
had taken in desperation. With this destruction he saw as well the
wiping out of his life of Bella.

Ah, at Troy