take up arms, shoot off guns and hack at the bodies
of their fellow-men with swords and spears. This thing, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, seemed incredible. To politicians
it was simply unthinkable. For politics are a game played in strict
accordance with a set of rules. For several centuries nobody in these
islands had broken the rules. It had come to be regarded as impossible
that any one could break them. No one expects his opponent at the
bridge table to draw a knife from his pocket and run amuck when the
cards go against him. Nobody expected that the north of Ireland
Protestants would actually fight. To threaten fighting is, of course,
well within the rules of the game, a piece of bluff which any one is
entitled to try if he thinks he will gain anything by it. Half the
politicians in both countries, and half the inhabitants of England,
were laughing at the Belfast bluff. The rest of the politicians and
the other half of the inhabitants of England were pretending to
believe what Belfast said so as to give an air of more terrific
verisimilitude to the bluff. Conroy, guided by the instinct for the
true meaning of things which had led him to great wealth, believed
that the talk was more than bluff. Bob Power, relying on what he knew
of the character of one man, came to the same conclusion.

"Who is the man you know?" said Conroy. "Not Babberly, is it?"

"Oh Lord! no," said Bob. "Babberly is--well, Babberly talks a lot."

"That's so," said Conroy. "But if it isn't Babberly, who is it?"

"McNeice," said Bob, "Gideon McNeice."

"H'm. He's something in some university, isn't he?"

Conroy spoke contemptuously. He had a low opinion of the men who win
honours in universities. They seemed to him to be unpractical
creatures. He had, indeed, himself founded a university before he
left America and handsomely endowed several professorial chairs. But
he did so in the spirit which led Dean Swift to found a lunatic
asylum. He wanted to provide a kind of hospital for a class of men who
ought, for the sake of society, to be secluded, lest their theories
should come inconveniently athwart the plans of those who are engaged
in the real business of life.

"McNeice," said Bob, "is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He was
my tutor."

Then he told Conroy the story of Gideon McNeice's life as far as he
knew it at that time. It was a remarkable story, but not yet, as it
became afterwards, strikingly singular.

Gideon