got to stop. It is rank foolishness. What do I know of her? God knows what her life has been. She is not the woman I have dreamed of. She is not within a hundred miles of the kind of woman I could spend my life with.... A reckless, careless vagabond! Good-hearted, yes, full of fine impulses ... full of charm! But when the glamour has gone ... what then?"

He had that gift and curse of his race of seeing too far--the worthlessness of the prize at the end of the race, the rotten core inside the rosy apple. Perhaps why Irishmen achieve so little, is that nothing which can be got seems to them worth while getting!

So he said to himself firmly:

"This thing has got to stop."

He said it and meant it right up to the last night of the voyage--a night when they stayed late in their deck chairs under a glorious moon that transformed the sea into a golden harvest of promise. Many other couples sat along the deck laughing and jesting, announcing their intention to stay up until the Statue of Liberty hove in sight, but well aware that the purser would be prowling along the deck at about half-past ten with hinting scowls for all loiterers. Long before the purser came, however, the keen air had driven most people below, and there was no one left except Westenra and Mrs. Valdana, and a far couple in the shadow of the bridge.

A silence had fallen upon Westenra and his companion, one of those silences that have lips to speak and hands to caress. A little wind blew past them carrying a snatch of her hair across his lips. He had never before felt a woman's hair on his lips! Her pale hand nervous and lonely lay outside the rug in which she was wrapped.

"That hand looks cold lying there," he said, and taking it drew it under a fold of his own rug, and held it fast. It lay in his without response like a little stone hand, but through his palm he could feel her pulse beating wild and uncertain, and that stirred him strangely, yet awoke the doctor in him too. He remembered the brandy-and-soda she had drunk the first evening, and every evening since. He remembered too his own cynical thought, and repeated it now, though his voice held little cynicism.

"I 'll give you two years longer to live if you keep on at this rate."

"What rate?" she asked in surprise.

"Drinking, smoking, taking drugs. What drug is it you take?"

"You seem to know all my vices," she said laughing a little tremulously. She was leaning back in her chair looking very pale. "I have to take veronal sometimes to make me sleep."

"You would sleep naturally if you gave up smoking and drinking, and lived a quiet natural life."

"But then I could n't write."

"Well, you must give up writing."

"But then I could n't live," she said laughing. "You don't seem to know that I write for my living--it is my work."

"Your work is a curse to you if it makes you do these things."

"It is all I have," was her strange answer.

He turned in his chair and looked at her. In her face was none of the bitter humiliation of the woman whose weaknesses are suddenly exposed and condemned. She was smiling a little, a smile with a twist to it, like the smile of a child who is determined not to weep. And her smoke-coloured eyes, bright and sad with tears, and exile, and lost joys, and all the sorrow of the Irishry, were the eyes of the woman who had been given him in a dream. While he looked at her she closed them and sat very still. At last he knew that there was no question of fleeing from Fate. He leaned forward and laid his lips on her sad smiling mouth, and found there the answer to many a question.

Yet when he spoke it was to ask another.

"Now will you leave writing?"

"Yes, Garrett," she said simply. "I will leave everything for you; I think it was written so in the beginning of things."