forging steel, the consciousness of
mastery over the work that lay to his hands--these were the things that
seemed to him to give life a purpose and man a destiny. He would whistle
a tune as he mixed the mortar with the broad shovel, for it gave him a
feeling of the knitting of the building with the ages. He pitied the
farmer who looked helplessly upon his corn as it was beaten to the
ground by the first storm that blew from the sea; he was upon a work
that would withstand the storms of centuries. The scent of lime and
mortar greeted his nostrils. When he moved about the splinters crunched
under his feet. Everything around him was hard and stubborn, but he was
the master of it all. In his dreams in the night he would reach out his
hands for the feel of the hard stone, a burning desire in his breast to
put it into shape, to give it nobility in the scheme of a building.

It was while Martin Cosgrave walked through the building that Ellen
Miscal came to him with the second letter from America. The carpenter
was hammering at something below. The letter said that Rose Dempsey and
her sister, Sheela, would be home in the late harvest. "With all I saw
since I left Kilbeg," Rose Dempsey wrote, "I never saw one that I
thought as much of as Martin Cosgrave."

When Ellen Miscal left him, Martin Cosgrave stood very quietly looking
through the cut-stone tracery window. The beech trees were swaying
slowly outside. Their music was in his ears.

Then he remembered that he was standing in the room where he would take
Rose Dempsey in his arms. It was here he would tell her of all the
bitter things he had locked up in his heart when she had gone away from
him. It was here he would tell her of the day of resurrection, when all
the bitter thoughts had burst into flower at the few words that told of
her return. It was that day of great tumult within him that thought of
the building had come into his mind.

When Martin Cosgrave walked out of the room the carpenter and a
neighbour boy were arguing about something at the foot of the stairs.

"It's too steep, I'm telling you," the boy was saying.

"What do you know about it?"

"I know this much about it, that if a little child came running down
that stairs he'd be apt to fall and break his neck."

Then the two men went out, still arguing.

Martin Cosgrave sat down on one of the steps of the stairs. A child
running down the steps! His child! A child bearing his name! He would be
prattli