n
London with Gilbert and the others, I'd be happy again!" He thought of
John Marsh, and as he leant over the side of the boat, looking down on
the dark water flowing beneath him, he seemed to see Marsh's eager face,
framed in the window of the railway carriage. He almost heard Marsh
saying again, "Well, what do _you_ propose to do for Ireland?..."

"Oh, damn Ireland," he said out loud.

He walked away from the place where he had imagined he had seen Marsh's
face peering at him out of the water, and as he walked along the deck,
he could hear the noise of hammering in the shipyard made by the men on
the night-shift. Tom Arthurs's brain was still working, though Tom
Arthurs was now at home.

"That's real work," Henry murmured to himself, "and a lot better than
gabbling about Ireland's soul as if it were the only soul in the world!
Poor old John! I disappoint him horribly...." He was standing in the
bows of the boat, looking towards the Lough. "I wonder," he said to
himself, "whether Mary'll be at Whitcombe station!"

3

The peculiar sense of isolation which overwhelms an Irishman when he is
in England, fell upon Henry the moment he climbed into the carriage at
Lime Street station. None of the passengers in his compartment spoke to
each other, whereas in Ireland, every member of the company would have
been talking like familiars in a few minutes. About an hour after the
train had left Liverpool, some one leant across to the passenger facing
him and asked for a match, and a box of matches was passed to him
without a word from the man who owned them. "Thanks!" said the passenger
who had borrowed the box, as he returned it. No more was said by any one
for half an hour, and then the man opposite to Henry stretched himself
and said, "We're getting along!" and turned and laid his head against
the window and went to sleep.

"We _are_ different!" Henry thought to himself. "We're certainly
different ... only I wonder does the difference matter much!"

He tried to make conversation with his neighbour, but was unsuccessful,
for his neighbour replied only in monosyllables, and sometimes did not
even articulate at all, contenting himself with a grunt....

"Well, why should he talk to me?" Henry thought to himself. "He isn't
interested in me or my opinions, and perhaps he wants to read or
think!..."

Marsh would have denied that the man wanted to think. He would have
denied that the man had the capacity to think at all. Hen