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hope he will. . . . He wouldn't me: I'd almost rather have Macarthy.'

'I hate you!' screamed Barbara, clenching her hands.

'You always did,' returned Calvinia, eyeing her scornfully. 'D'you think I care a damn whether you do or not?'

Adam, entering the room at this point, found them outstaring one another, and asked in innocence: 'Are you rehearsing "Deirdre" or what?'

'I'm sure I don't know what your friend Barbara is playing at,' declared Miss Macfie, and, with a gesture of disdain, she flounced away, leaving the door open behind her.

This Barbara carefully closed, and then drew Adam over to the window, whence they looked down upon the Green and that noble effigy which many take to be St Stephen, but was intended by the artist to resemble King George II. Adam did not see this work of art, but only the tears in Barbara's eyes, and he put his arm, respectfully affectionate, around her slim waist. Thereupon she whispered: 'You dear little thing,' and put her arm round his neck.

At length she said again: 'I wish you were old enough now to take me to India, and that we could start now.' The words were murmured just loud enough for him to hear and be fired by: but she checked his ready torrent of affection by adding, very matter of fact: 'You're not, and never will be.. So what's the use of talking? Let's go and drink tea at Mitchell's instead.'

Though he had been thinking of Josephine all day, and wondering if, after all, Mr Macarthy would triumph and keep her in the world until he grew fully to man's estate, Adam's heart was curiously high and happy as Barbara and he walked, body fluttering by body, past the Shelbourne Hotel, where first, as a ragged infant, he had witnessed the existence of a life that

was something more than a struggle for food and drink, and down Grafton Street to Mitchell's. He forgot what a little while had passed since he walked down it with Caroline Brady, and noticed for the first time that Hollander's was almost opposite Mitchell's: but it was open, and, perhaps because he saw it from the other side of the street, seemed different from what it had been when he met her coming out. And yet, he remembered now how, on his thirteenth birthday, leaving Mitchell's with Barbara, he had seen Caroline, no doubt coming out of Hollander's, and wondered if she had been her own ghost.

Then, in the restaurant, that old notion of indefinite identity came over him, and Barbara seemed to him in a sense Caroline: Caroline as she ought to have been, if only the gods had been good to her. It did not occur to him that any girl of her age could be more happily circumstanced than Barbara Burns, with her charming form and cultured mind and manifold physical and mental accomplishments: to say nothing of being the only child of her brilliant mother and rightfully popular father. To him Barbara Burns, as she loosened her pretty wraps and showed her pretty throat, peeping, all milk-white innocence, at him from the other side of the little table at Mitchell's, or leaning forward to listen to his undertone so that her elbows kissed his, seemed the human embodiment of a fairy princess. The embryonic critic lurking in his brain whispered that the charm lay in her having a spice of Caroline's devilry, without a taint of Caroline's coarseness: but the romantic trumpeted persistently that in the past love had been joy slain by death, in the present triumphant over it. For sure, Adam had known no happier hour than that with Barbara Burns at Mitchell's, during which he dreamt himself her accepted lover.

It was cooling when she commenced, with an abrupt movement, to gather her things to go: deadly chilling

when she resisted his effort to pay their bill: 'No, no, my dear little man,' she said; 'you know, Mr LeaperCarahar wouldn't like it.'

"Leaper-Carahar!' cried Adam, driving the nails into the palm of his ungloved hand.

Barbara's fingers on his lips (just like Caroline) silenced him. 'You must have heard we were engaged.'

Adam thrust from his lips the hand he had almost kissed. 'If I had, I'd have said it was a damned lie!' he stormed. 'Damn you and your Leaper-Carahar !' Then, conscious that he was making a scene Barbara was endeavouring to hide, he fled from the lighted shop and blundered into the wintry darkness of Grafton Street, his fingers gripping the throat of Mr Leaper-Carahar, C.B., more apoplectic in Adam's greeneyed phantasy than in reality.

At the corner of Nassau Street a draught of north-east wind, driving sleet across the College park, cooled his revengeful pride and wakened shame. He heard his own voice saying to his lady-love of a moment ago: 'Damn you and your Leaper-Carahar !' in the same blasting rage as he had once cursed Father Tudor and his Three Divine Persons.

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And some other memory stirred within him. Perhaps the first of his life. . . . Was it not just with such frantic cadence he had once heard his mother shriek at his godfather: 'Damn you and your Emily Robinson'? . . .

What did that mean, if even in those distant days she had not been infatuated with O'Toole? . . . Then a lurid light pierced his brain and established there an idea which, by the time he reached Noll Goldsmith's kindly pitiful effigy, had become a settled conviction. Clinging to the College railings, he pressed his forehead close against them, and, while the trams groaned and thundered and clashed their bells behind him, he thought: 'O'Toole begot me. . . . God! what a filthy thing is love.'

He had been standing thus he knew not how long, when a familiar deep voice spoke down at him: 'You are ill, my friend; I think you live in my direction, Mountjoy Square.'

Adam let go the railings and nodded silently.

'You had better take my arm and we'll walk on together,' said the big man. Adam obeyed, and, as they crossed by Tommy Moore's statue to Westmoreland Street, said mechanically: 'Thank your honour, and God bless you.'

For he knew that he was being cared for once more by Dr Hillingdon-Ryde, who had been kind to him when he was a child: and for the moment he was struggling with the nightmare of being a child again

Chapter Thirty-Six

OF A TOMBSTONE

DR HILLINGDON-RYDE delivered Adam into his guardian's hands at Mountjoy Square. 'Our young friend was looking ill when I passed him outside Trinity. So I suggested that we should walk home together.'

He said no more, but Mr Macarthy read the surmise in his manly eyes, and smiled: 'Adam does not drink,' he said, 'but he suffers badly from nerves.'

'The dickens he does, poor fellow!' exclaimed the big man, as one who knew them not, and took his leave with a kindly farewell.

Mr Macarthy produced an unwonted half bottle of claret and put it before the fire. The warmth of it restored Adam to his normal self as they shared it for dinner: And after dinner, before very long, his guardian saw him home to St George's Place and watched him go to bed.

He had the more reason for this since there was no one to understand Adam at St George's Place now: Herr Behre was no longer to be found in the eyrie that had been his refuge while a whole generation of Dubliners were born into the world and married and brought forth young, and perhaps left the world again. He had been one of those who declared that war was impossible: 'The peoples of Europe will not sanction it,' he insisted; 'their leaders are not that crètin Wilhelm nor that slink-butcher Poincaré: The men that matter, the leaders of the people, are Liebknecht and Jaurés. . . There is no enmity between Liebknecht was arrested, and

them.' But when

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