y the rest of us can't do as well."

"Yes," agreed the tinker, "but the story--"

"Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany,
fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea." Patsy
clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of
the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery
clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were
seeing the things of which she was telling. "A wee white cottage--the
roses and the cliffs," repeated Patsy, "and a great, grim, silent
figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at
her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind
that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble--old as
the peopled world itself.

"Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things--love
and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great
actress, a favorite at the Comedie Francaise; but she left her work
and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman
with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love
more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful
verses about her--and his beloved motherland, and she said them for
him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the
idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in
the wee white cottage with the roses--until her child was born and
poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and
love naught. The woman went back to her theater--and another man, a
man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside
the silent, grim Irishman.

"Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man
had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the
child played on till dark came and she fell asleep--there on the
door-sill, under the roses. 'Twas a neighbor, passing, that found
her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After
that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children
called her '_la pauvre petite_,' shared their saints'-days' gifts
with her, and bought her candles that she might make a _novena_ to
bring her father back again. But 'twas her mother it brought
instead."

Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone
now, and she smiled wistfully. "See! he's found a friend, a comrade
to sin