a sonnet in his eye and it
impeded his vision. Meanwhile, the wheeled traffic of the street
addressed language to him which was so vigorous as almost to be
poetical. She had pulled him from beneath a horse's head which a
frantic driver was endeavouring to pull the mouth from. The words of
the driver as he sailed away were--"Go home and die, you moonstruck,
gibbering, wobbling omadhaun," and she had thought that his description
was apt and eloquent.

She saw him a second time, when her father took her for a visit to the
Four Courts. He was addressing the Court, and, while his language was
magnificent, the judge must have considered that his law was on
vacation, for he lost his cause.

They met again in her own home. Her father knew him very well, and,
although they seldom met, he had that strong admiration for him which a
vigorous and overbearing personality sometimes extends to a shy and
unworldly friend--

"A perfect frost as a lawyer," he used to say, "but as a poet, sir,
Shakespeare is an ass beside him, and if any one asks you who said so,
tell them that I did, sir."

He sat beside her at dinner and forgot her before the first course was
removed, and, later, when he knocked a glass off the table, he looked
at her as though she were responsible for the debris.

He did not make love to her, a new and remarkable omission in her
experience of men, however bald, and while this was refreshing for a
time it became intolerable shortly. She challenged him, as a woman
can, with the flash of her eyes, the quick music of her laugh, but he
was marvelling at the width of the horizon, rapt in contemplation of
the distant mountains, observing how a flower poised and nodded on its
stalk, following the long, swooping flight of a bird or watching how
the moon tramped down on the stars. So far as she could see he was
unaware that her charms were of other than average significance--

"These poets are awful fools," said she angrily.

But the task of awakening this landlocked nature was one which
presented many interesting features to her. She was really jealous
that he paid her no attention, and, being accustomed to the homage of
every male thing over fifteen years of age, she resented his
negligence, became interested in him, as every one is in the abnormal,
and when a woman becomes interested in a man she is unhappy until he
becomes interested in her.

There had arrived, with the express intention of asking her to marry
him,