to be alone with her for just a while. . . . He was not quite clear whether he wanted to see her about her daughter or just . . . Then visions of other visitors drifted into his mind, and the thought of some of them burnt deeper still. But his tongue never even touched their names. Unless it was Caroline Brady. Sitting there looking at Mr Macarthy across his bedstead, he could visualise his own little room and Caroline Brady in an enlarged reproduction of what she had been when he kissed her in Dalkey Tunnel, there before him. ... With an effort of will he dismissed her from his mind that he might work back to the subject of the baronet: alive or dead, poor Caroline did not belong to that galley.

'About Sir David Byron-Quinn,' he began, and was pained to hear Mr Macarthy groan. He apologised for returning to the subject.

'Never mind,' said Mr Macarthy, 'carry on. What do you want to know now?'

'I thought last night in bed,' said Adam, 'that I'd like to learn all his poetry off by heart.' 'The dickens!' said Mr Macarthy.

As this expletive did not amount to a command to stop, Adam proceeded. 'Of course, I know he wasn't a great poet; not like Shakespeare and Byron and Scott and,' his tongue went on mechanically, 'and Keats and Yeats.

'No, nor Moody and Sankey,' Mr Macarthy murmured; but the point of this observation, if point it had, was lost on Adam.

'I should think, sir,' he suggested very cautiously, 'I should think you would be right in saying that he was a better poet or anyhow very near as good as Mr Tinkler.'

'As Mr Tinkler?' Mr Macarthy repeated with a questioning glance. 'What do you know about Mr Tinkler?'

Adam informed him how he had once been brought

to the Muses Club, where he had heard Mr Tinkler read certain of his verses.

'Oh,' said Mr Macarthy, and that was all he vouchsafed upon the subject of Mr Tinkler. Of Sir David he said that the man had been a genuine poet in intention, but not often an effective one in reality. 'Byron-Quinn,' said he, 'was your true amateur with the amateur's qualities and defects. Being a man of talent with no need to write for a living, he wrote nothing, so far as we know, that was beneath contempt: on the other hand, having no one to criticise him, no one but himself to please, and not being in an artistic sense self-critical, he wrote nothing or precious little, that will satisfy a man of taste. . . Don't imagine that I set up to be a man of taste, but even I feel that the things of his which impressed me twenty years ago fail to impress me now.' He paused and passed his hand thoughtfully across his forehead. 'It may be that I shall be impressed by them again, but I think not.'

Adam, glowing with the satisfaction that his guardian was entering into a serious literary discussion with him, said, unconsciously imitating his tone: 'I was quite impressed when Mr O'Meagher recited "The Dead Lover" to us last spring.'

Mr Macarthy smiled, but answered in grave tones, 'And you were impressed when you read it for yourself here yesterday?'

'Not so much impressed,' said Adam guardedly, 'but, as I told you yesterday, I'm not sure that I know what it means. Do you?'

'And as I told you yesterday I don't pretend to know what it means,' said Mr Macarthy, 'but I take it to have been, possibly, in the poet's mind that while men have the power to love many women, women have the power to love only one man.'

'Oh,' said Adam, blushing he knew not why, 'Oh! Do you think that, too?'

'For my part,' said Mr Macarthy, 'I conceive that the late Major Byron-Quinn may possibly have been wrong.' He looked at Adam quizzingly: 'Let me hear what you think about it yourself.'

'I think that he must have been a very conceited sort of fellow,' Adam promptly responded.

'That one may presume is the view of the world,' said Mr Macarthy, 'and it is scarcely for me to say it is not right-yet I happen to know that the poet's boast is true of at least one woman; for she makes no secret of it.'

'Who's that?' asked Adam.

Said Mr Macarthy: 'Never mind.'

Ordinarily Adam would have taken those two words as a definite closing of the audience, but he sat still a little while sunk in thought until he asked at last in a hushed voice: 'Is that lady dead?'

Mr Macarthy turned over on his side and put his hand over his eyes, as though shutting out the sunlight. Adam thought he did not mean to answer him, but at last the words came slowly: 'No, she is not exactly dead: but so changed out of all recognition, even since I first knew her, that if she were to meet her dead lover to-night, he would turn away from her in disgust.'

Adam felt a tremor between excitement and horror. 'It was the Marchesa,' he blurted.

'Never mind who it was,' said Mr Macarthy sternly, and Adam rose to go, feeling this to be definitely a dismissal; but as he was leaving the room his guardian called him back to say: 'I was unjust to Sir David Byron-Quinn: he would not turn away from any woman with disgust. Not in any circumstances whatever. He had his faults, but he was not that sort of man.'

Chapter Eighteen

OF A CHRISTMAS PRESENT

CHRISTMAS DAY fell on a Wednesday. Adam, paying his third visit to his guardian on the previous Monday, found him up, and on Tuesday he declared himself well enough, though the doctor appeared of a contrary opinion, to go out. As a compromise with his medical adviser, he promised to be back before nightfall; but, with Adam as a companion, Christmas shopping did not allow him to keep this promise. Darkness had already fallen before they were clear of Grafton Street, on their return journey. Working their way through the crowd outside Hollander's, they ran into the arms, or at least Adam ran into the arms, of the Marchesa. Kissing him affectionately, she cried : 'Happy Christmas! I heard you were home from that horrible school. How hateful all schools are, even boys' schools, though I should prefer them to my own. St Enda's is all right'-she turned to Mr Macarthy: 'Why didn't you send him to St Enda's?'

'For too many reasons to tell you now,' said Mr Macarthy calmly.

'Your reasons are always nonsensical,' the Marchesa declared, 'but I suppose you're right: you always are.' 'Sometimes,' said Mr Macarthy.

'Don't be so vain!' cried the Marchesa. She appealed to Adam, pointing her finger at his guardian: 'Isn't he awfully vain? Don't you find him so? Of course you do.'

In point of fact Adam sometimes did, but he was glad, for more than one reason, when the Marchesa

went on, without giving him time to answer her question: 'I've often thought of you while you were away; I was thinking of you this very day-in fact, I was thinking of you just now, for I'd been buying a Christmas present for you; I hope you'll find it when you get home . . . What are you looking at?'

Adam did not quite know what he was looking at, but he knew who had been looking at him, though with eyes that held no recognition . . . Caroline Brady, dressed, like a grown-up little lady, in the height of fashion, as he conceived the height of fashion to be. But where was she? Where had he seen her? He dared not say; for it appeared to him that he had seen her inside the glass front of Hollander's window. This his common sense, or what he called his common sense, told him must have been a delusion; for Caroline Brady simply could not have been inside Hollander's window.. What could she have been doing there? Nothing. His vision of the window was blocked by the crowd around it. He had caught only a fleeting glimpse of her. . . . The crowd opened again and he had another such glimpse of the window, but there was no Caroline Brady to be seen. His mind worked back to the more tangible joy of the Marchesa's present. He tried to speak of it, but, piqued by his off-handed manner when she told him of it, she bade him and his guardian good-bye.

Adam almost reproached himself with allowing his attention to be distracted from the Marchesa even by the appearance, real or fanciful, of Caroline Brady. As they climbed on a tram at the corner of Suffolk Street, he recalled that once before, on his very birthday it was, Caroline Brady's ghost had come between him and the Marchesa. . . . Worse than that, had come between him and the Marchesa and Barbara Burns too. . . . It was uncanny to think that Caroline Brady's ghost should have the power to do this: it made it seem such a real ghost, animated by a sort of