enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as
friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of
her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said
to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden,
and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to
have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the
other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he
had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have
grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when
he first knew her.

"Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly;
and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there
should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then.

"Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her,
"she's only a kid!"

And sometimes that explanation seemed to satisfy him. There were other
times when it failed to satisfy him, and he told himself that Mary was
justly cold to him because he had not been loyal to their compact. He
had not answered her letters and he had made love to Sheila Morgan. "I
suppose," he said to himself, "I'd be at Ballymartin now, making love to
Sheila, if it hadn't been for that horse!"

He tried on several occasions to talk to Mary about her unanswered
letter, to invent some explanation of his neglect, but always he failed
to say anything, too nervous to begin, too afraid of being snubbed, too
eager to leave the explanation over until the next day; and so he never
"had it out" with her.

"I am a fool!" he would say to himself in angry rebuke, but even while
he was reproaching himself, his mind was devising an excuse for his
behaviour. "We're really too young," he would add. "It's silly of me to
think of this sort of thing at all, and Mary's still a schoolgirl!..."

"I'll just say something to her before I go away," he thought.
"Something that will ... explain everything!"

Then Mr. Quinn wrote to him to say that he was in London on business. He
was anxious that Henry should come to town so that they could return to
Ireland together. "We'll go to Dublin," he wrote, "and I'll leave you
there. You needn't come to Ballymartin until the end of the first term."

He felt strangely chilled by his father's letter. This jolly holiday at
Boveyhayne was to be the end of one life, and