pride in it. Certainly she meant to be affable, or she would not have sat down on the arm of his chair, so close that he could feel her bosom, what there was of it, rise and fall, and hear her heart beat, quicker than he believed to indicate a normal state of health.

Her hand, with unexpected gentleness, ruffled the hair at the back of his head from the collar upwards, as she asked in a voice hardly to be recognised: 'What are you thinking of?'

'I'm listening to the music,' answered Adam readily. And, in fact, he was conscious, among other things, of an harmonium wheezing mechanically at Lady Bland's side of the wall, and children's voices wailing obstinately:

"I know that Jesus loves me,
I know that Jesus loves me,
I know that Jesus loves me:
The Bible tells me so.'

Just as in the past he would shout for an hour at a time:

'I'll be true to Jesus Christ,

And faithful unto death.'

And he had still a vague feeling that the Jesus of the slums and Father Innocent was the only true, genuine, original article; while him of Fitzwilliam Square and Lady Bland was an impostor retained in the service of the Pharisees, whose real worship was at the shrine of Mammon.

'Do you call that music?' Calvinia demanded. 'That disgusting noise next door?'

'What would you call it?' Adam asked.

'What I have called it,' she repeated, 'a disgusting noise. How could you listen to it when I am talking to you?'

'I couldn't help it,' Adam said humbly, and was dismayed to hear himself volunteer: 'I knew a man once- he paused; for it seemed to him that he could not speak of Father Innocent to Calvinia.

'Well?' Calvinia asked, as she marked his distraught manner, 'What about it? I've known a man or two myself.'

'Oh, it's nothing really,' said Adam.

Calvinia more or less playfully pinched his ear. 'Come, tell me about your man,' she commanded.

Adam found it strangely difficult to control his mind with Miss Macfie sitting so very close beside him. He rather wished that she gave him a little more room he was almost stifled. He was thinking of this rather than of what he was confessing to her: 'He only said that Lady Bland was the worst woman in Dublin.'

Calvinia, faintly sniggering, asked, in a bored voice: 'Did he mean the dowdiest, or was it some sort of a joke?'

'It was no joke,' Adam assured her; 'he wasn't given to making jokes about women. . . He was a priest.'

'Oh, a priest,' she laughed contemptuously. 'I suppose someone had told him that she misbehaved herself with Albert Tinkler.'

Adam reddened under her satirical questioning and, all unthinking, said: 'You wouldn't tell me that a lady living in Fitzwilliam Square would go and do a thing like that?'

'A thing like what?' asked Calvinia, still laughing: but, as Adam's eyes fled from hers, the speed of her voice quickened and her laughter died down to a mocking undertone: 'Do you mean that Lady Bland wouldn't sit on the arm of Albert Tinkler's chair, as I'm sitting on the arm of yours, rumpling Albert Tinkler's hair as I've been rumpling yours .? D'you mean that a lady wouldn't do what I'm doing

now,' and she thrust down her savage mouth and bit his ear.

Adam felt himself unpleasantly on fire, as though Miss Macfie's teeth had set light to his ear and the conflagration was spreading. He had no will to fan the flame, if he lacked the strength of mind to stamp it out. It seemed to him that he was sorry that he had come to Calvinia's house, and yet he could not wish himself away.

Suddenly her hands caught his jaw in a firm grip, so that he could not but look her in the face. 'Answer my question,' shè hissed or growled, he doubted which tone she used: 'Do you think I'm doing what a lady ought not to do?'

Adam's fatal love of the truth, inculcated by Mr Macarthy perhaps even more persistently than by Father Innocent, paralysed his tongue, and he stuttered: 'I wouldn't go so far as to say that.'

Instantly the face looking into his grew, he thought, old and horrible: the eyes that held his eyes turned to a wild cat's, and the thin hand stopped half-way in a caress to harden into a fist that struck him, forcibly as might a spent bullet, on the cheek-bone.

'You contemptible fool!' she snarled and as Adam gazed wonderingly at her and stammered out a broken word of question, she cut him short, crying: 'Little imbecile, be off.'

Then Adam, seeing her prepared to strike viciously at him again, plunged from his place beside her and, terrified in body and soul, found himself whirling out of the room and downstairs to the hall, where he strove with eyes blind from pain to discover the means to open the door. He was too bewildered to perceive that, thanks to the foresight of Miss Macfie, it needed two hands at once, one on the bolt of each lock, to open it and at last Calvinia, having watched him for a little while with malicious eyes from the staircase, had to come to his aid, lest his clumsiness

:

should betray them both. With a pressure of her lips, oddly reminding him of Father Tudor, she beat his hand from the door with her clenched, ringed fingers on his knuckles: 'Imbecile,' she said again: ‘Have you never been in a decent house before?'

He did not answer, shrinking from her that he might snatch his hat and stick from the corner where he had dropped them when struggling with the latches. Then he sprang out and down the steps, leaving the door open behind him. . . . It closed with a bang, and there followed silence in Fitzwilliam Square. But that quietude was broken once again as he hastened away into a gathering mist, broken by the wheezing of the harmonium at Lady Bland's and the piping of weary, desperate little voices singing, with their eyes fixed, no doubt, on the photograph Adam had seen in the back room of the clergyman who suffered little children to suffer coming unto him:

'Jesus loves me: this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong :
They are weak, but He is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me,

Yes, Jesus loves me,

Yes, Jesus loves me:

The Bible tells me so.'

The words trailed after him mockingly through the mist that was rising from the vegetation in the square, to meet another heavier cloud of fog creeping in from the sea to swallow Dublin in the coming night. No star shone in the heavens, and no bell rang.

Chapter Forty

THE WATERS THAT DROWNED FAN TWEEDY

TURNING his back on Fitzwilliam Square, and breaking his way through the thickening mist, Adam felt himself sunk again in the misery of his childhood: that misery which sees no meaning whatever in the cruelty of life. The physical pain and shock he suffered was not little; for he felt his bruised left eye swelling so that he could not use it but the extraordinary indignity of what he had suffered chiefly impressed him. He had not gone to Calvinia's house to please himself, but only because he had felt it discourteous to refuse : and surely he had said nothing, done nothing, there which could offend the most difficult woman: his attitude had been purely passive and compliant. Yet, she had flung herself upon him in such a rage as he had seen no woman but his mother give way to, and had beaten him as none but his mother had ever beaten him. He had long regarded Miss Macfie as eccentric, and he had heard stories from Mr Pim and others of her doing queer things: but never had he foreseen the possibility of her doing so queer a thing as to kiss him first and the next instant beat him and hoosh him out of the house like a pig out of a flower-garden.

These things he thought as he scuttled out of Fitzwilliam Square and on towards Stephen's Green through the darkening mist: the road he had taken leaving Lady Bland's ten years before: but he did not think them rationally and in lucid sequence: it seemed rather that all the years of his life, near seventeen now, had been knocked into one incomprehensible rigmarole