remote possibility
to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death.
Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a
romanticist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.

It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up
in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought
of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a
sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went
to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the
feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he
knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any
cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of
the candle when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of
his room gently closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door
and opened it. There was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though
some one was there in the darkness. His lips framed the words,

"Who is it? Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.

A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the
supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable
experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry,
and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to
tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness
of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of
trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly
the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he
found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last
two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was
swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:

"Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.

"When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"

He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament
kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to