or, and for a few moments more we bandied quick
questions and replies like children playing at battledore and
shuttlecock. Then he said:

"But I'm after thinking it's mortal strange I never heard him mention
you. There was only one chum at home he used to talk about and that was
a man--a boy, I mean. Mally he was calling him--that's short for
Maloney, I suppose."

"For Mary," I said.

"Mary, is it? Why, by the saints, so it is! Where in the name of St.
Patrick has been the Irish head at me that I never thought of that
before? And you were . . . Yes? Well, by the powers, ye've a right to be
proud of him, for he was thinking pearls and diamonds of you. I was
mortal jealous of Mally, I remember. 'Mally's a stunner,' he used to
say. 'Follow you anywhere, if you wanted it, in spite of the devil and
hell.'"

The sparkling eyes were growing misty by this time but the woman in me
made me say--I couldn't help it--

"I dare say he's had many girl friends since my time, though?"

"Narra a one. The girls used to be putting a glime on him in
Dublin--they're the queens of the world too, those Dublin girls--but
never a skute of the eye was he giving to the one of them. I used to
think it was work, but maybe it wasn't . . . maybe it was. . . ."

I dare not let him finish what I saw he was going to say--I didn't know
what would happen to me if he did--so I jumped in by telling him that,
if he would step into the car, I would drive him back to Rome.

He did so, and all the way he talked of Martin, his courage and resource
and the hardships he had gone through, until (with backward thoughts of
Alma and my husband riding away over the Campagna) my heart, which had
been leaping like a lamb, began to ache and ache.

We returned by the Old Appian Way, where the birds were building their
nests among the crumbling tombs, through the Porta San Paolo, and past
the grave of the "young English poet" of whom I have always thought it
was not so sad that he died of consumption as in the bitterness of a
broken heart.

All this time I was so much at home with the young Irish doctor, who was
Martin's friend, that it was not until I was putting him down at his
hotel that I remembered I did not even know his name.

It was O'Sullivan.

FORTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Every day during our visit to Rome I had reminded myself of the Reverend
Mother's invitation to call on her, and a sense of moral taint had
prevented me, but now I determined to