given me a more powerful
impression of the mysterious, the weird. Nothing showed at the door for
some time, but I kept my eye upon it. I was rewarded. A cluster of heads
and shoulders of men, swarthy, gloomy, some awful foreboding in the
expression of their faces, hung round the door and peered silently down
at the Friar seated at the fire. Again I had the sense that they would
not be surprised to see any sort of apparition. The heads disappeared,
and there was more shuffling outside the windows as if shy animals were
hovering around the house. The door creaked again, and another bunch of
heads and shoulders made a cluster about it. They looked, as far as I
could see them, the same group of heads, but I had the feeling that they
were fresh spectators. They were taking their view in turn.

The priest ventured some conversation with the woman of the house.

"Do you think will Kevin live, Father?"

"He should have more courage," the Friar said.

"We will all have more courage now that you have read over him."

"Keep the faith. It is all in the hands of God. It is only what is
pleasing to Him that will come to pass."

"Blessed be His Holy Name." The woman inclined her head as she spoke
the words. The priest rose to go.

The young girl came out of the room. "Kevin will live," she said. "He
spoke to me." Her eyes were shining as she gazed at her mother.

"Could you tell what words he spoke?"

"I could. He said, 'In the month of April, when the water runs clear in
the river, I will be playing the fideog.' That is what Kevin said."

"When the river is clear--playing the fideog," the elder woman repeated,
some look of trouble, almost terror, in her face. "The cross of Christ
between him and that fideog!"

The priest was moving to the door and I followed. As I did so I got a
glimpse, through the partly open room door, of the invalid. I saw the
long, pallid, nervous-looking face of a young man on the pillow. A light
fell on his brow, and I thought it had the height, and the arch, the
good shape sloping backward to the long head, of a musician. The eyes
were shining with an unnatural brightness. It was the face of an artist,
an idealist, intensified, idealised, by illness, by suffering, by
excitement, and I wondered if the vision which Kevin Hooban had of
playing the fideog by the river, when it ran clear in April, were a
vision of his heaven or his earth.

We left the house. Patch Keetly was taking the loop from a tr