r the curing of disease. He had helped as many men and
women mentally and morally as physically; the spirit of healing was
behind everything he did. His world recognized it, and that was why he
was never known by his name in all the district--he was only admiringly
called "The Young Doctor."

He had never been to Tralee since the Mazarines had arrived, though he
had passed it often and had sometimes seen Louise in the garden with her
dog, her black cat and her bright canary. The combination of the cat and
the canary did not seem incongruous where she was concerned; it was
as though something in her passionless self neutralized even the
antagonisms of natural history. She had made the gloomy black cat
and the light-hearted canary to be friends. Perhaps that came from an
everlasting patience which her life had bred in her; perhaps it was the
powerful gift of one in touch with the remote, primitive things.

The Young Doctor had also seen her in the paddock with the horses,
bare-headed, lithe and so girlishly slim, with none of the unmistakable
if elusive lines belonging to the maturity which marriage brings. He had
taken off his hat to her in the distance, but she had never waved a hand
in reply. She only stood and gazed at him, and her look followed him
long after he passed by. He knew well that in the gaze was nothing
of the interest which a woman feels in a man; it was the look of one
chained to a rock, who sees a Samaritan in the cheerless distance.

In the daily round of her life she was always busy; not restlessly, but
constantly, and always silently, busy. She was even more silent than
her laconic half-breed hired woman, Rada. There was no talk with her
gloating husband which was not monosyllabic. Her canary sang, but no
music ever broke from her own lips. She murmured over her lovely yellow
companion; she kissed it, pleaded with it for more song, but the only
music at her own lips was the occasional music of her voice; and it had
a colourless quality which, though gentle, had none of the eloquence and
warmth of youth.

In form and feature she was one made for emotion and demonstration, and
the passionate play of the innocent enterprises of wild youth; but there
was nothing of that in her. Gray age had drunk her life and had
given her nothing in return--neither companionship nor sympathy nor
understanding; only the hunger of a coarse manhood. Her obedience to
the supreme will of her jealous jailer gave no ground