his finest and best. There in
Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled
off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their
own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the
outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the
Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and
rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it;
their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.
The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the
merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile,
the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the
most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible
contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia,
I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them
all."

Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. "I love to hear you
talk," he said simply.

An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words
that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How
curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of
feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially
impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this
soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and
his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and
unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex
mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest
as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves
before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the
lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down
upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's
attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.

Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, and been eating. He pushed
aside his cheese-plate. "I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race
sometimes," he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. "But I make
up for it other times--most of the time--by scolding them. If it were
not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous."

"Ah," said Theron, deprecatingly, "who would not be enthusiastic in
talking of Miss Madden? What y