to return to the house by the
more open ground leading through the Druids' glen.

She had been here before in the very early morning before sunrise on her
way to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she had
never seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused for
a moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by the
cromlech.

Phyl, despite her American strain, was very Irish in one particular:
though cheerful and healthy and without a trace of morbidness in her
composition, she, still, was given to fits of melancholy--not depression,
melancholy. It is in the air of Ireland, the moist warm air that feeds the
shamrock and fills the glens with soft-throated echoes and it is in the
soul of the people.

Phyl, seated in this favourite spot of hers, where she had played as a
child on many a warm summer's afternoon, gave herself over to the
moonlight and the spirit of Recollection.

She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he had
occasioned in her mind had sunk to rest; she was thinking of her father,
of all the pleasant days that were no more--she remembered her dolls, the
wax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with that
mysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face,
true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju to
be propitiated. That thing had stirred in her a sort of religious
sentiment, had caused in her a thrill of worship real, though faint, far
more real than the worship of God that had been cultivated in her mind by
her teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child's mind in
somewhat the same way, but with a difference. The Ju-ju was a familiar,
she had even beaten and punched it when in a temper; the stone had always
filled her with respect.

There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed on
the past; we call them material and practical people; there are others in
which the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so that
their lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange land
we call yesterday.

In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open so
that they can see themselves as they were before they passed through the
change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind as
a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections
of forgotten gods o