est, but at the back of everything I'm
an Irishman; I have a fondness for the curious and the poetical and the
mysterious, and somehow you seemed to me last night to be mystery
itself, with your silence and your intentness." He dropped his voice to
the meditative key, unconsciously enjoying its soft, half-melancholy
cadences, and as he spoke the boy felt some chord in his own personality
vibrate to the mind that had asked for no introduction, demanded no
credentials, that had decreed their friendship and materialized it.

"No," the Irishman mused on, "there's no explaining it. You were mystery
itself, and you fired my imagination, because I happen to come from a
country of dreams. We Irish are born dreamers; sometimes we never wake
up at all, and then we're counted failures. But, I tell you what, when
all's said and done, we see what other men don't see. For instance,
what do you think my two friends saw in you last night?"

The boy shook his head, and there was a tremor of nervousness about his
mouth.

"They saw something dangerous--something to be avoided. Yet Mac is a
millionaire several times over, and Billy is distinctly a diplomatist
with a future."

The boy forced a smile; he was beginning to shrink from the pleasant
scrutiny, to wish that the vaporous fog of last night might dim the
searching light of the morning.

"What did they see?" he asked.

The Irishman looked at him humorously. "I hardly like to tell it to
you," he said, "but they marked you for an anarchist. An anarchist, for
all the world! As if any anarchist alive would travel first-class in
third-class clothes! You see, I'm blunt."

The boy, studying him, half in fear, half in doubt, laughed suddenly in
quick relief and amusement.

"An anarchist! How droll!"

"Wasn't it? I told them so. I also told them--"

"What?"

"My own beliefs."

"And your beliefs?"

"No! No! You won't draw me! But I'll tell you this much, for I've told
it before. I knew you were no common creature of intrigue; I accepted
you as mystery personified."

"And now you would solve me?" In his returning confidence the boy's eyes
danced.

"God forbid!" The vehemence of the reply was comic, and the Irishman
himself laughed as the words escaped him. "Oh no!" he added, soberly.
"Keep your mask! I don't want to tear it from you. Later on, perhaps,
I'll take a peep behind; but I can accept mysteries and miracles--I was
born into the Roman Catholic Church."

"And I into