o' the tears I shed? No, I am not. No
Irishman need take shame along av the tears he sheds for Ireland--God
bless her where she shtands!--wid the hob-nails av the crool tyrant
foreninst her bleeding neck an'----"

"Father, please----"

"That woman I warned ye of! She was here! 'Twas the wan-eyed lad who
seen her----"

Dulcie rose and took him by his arm. He made no resistance; but he
wept while she conducted him bedward, as the immemorial wrongs of
Ireland tore his soul.

VII

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

The tremendous tragedy in Europe, now nearing the end of the second
act, had been slowly shaking the drowsy Western World out of its snug
slumber of complacency. Young America was already sitting up in bed,
awake, alert, listening. Older America, more difficult to convince,
rolled solemn and interrogative eyes toward Washington, where the
wooden gods still sat nodding in a row, smiling vacuously at destiny
out of carved and painted features. Eyes had they but they saw not,
ears but they heard not; neither spake they through their mouths.

Yet, they that made them were no longer like unto them, for many an
anxious idolater no longer trusted in them. For their old God's voice
was sounding in their ears.

The voice of a great ex-president, too, had been thundering from the
wilderness; lesser prophets, endowed, however, with intellect and
vision, had been warning the young West that the second advent of
Attila was at hand; an officer of the army, inspired of God, had
preached preparedness from the market places and had established for
its few disciples an habitation; and a great Admiral had died of a
broken heart because his lips had been officially sealed--the wisest
lips that ever told of those who go down to the sea in ships.

Plainer and plainer in American ears sounded the mounting surf of
that blood-red sea thundering against the frontiers of Democracy;
clearer and clearer came the discordant clamour of the barbaric
hordes; louder and more menacing the half-crazed blasphemies of their
chief, who had given the very name of the Scourge of God to one among
the degenerate litter he had sired.

* * * * *

Garret Barres had been educated like any American of modern New York
type. Harvard, then five years abroad, and a return to his native city
revealed him as an ambitious, receptive, intelligent young man, deeply
interested in himself and his own affairs, theoretically patriotic