golf-ball with a spoon.... Shane could always see her, a Diana
on the greensward, leaning forward, listening to hear the smack of the
arrow on the target.... And both these women were his good friends, the
thought of them filling his mind like sweet lavender.... But when they
were each alone with him, and a little silence would come, then panic
would fall on him, and he would make an undignified escape from their
company proffering any old excuse.... And they would watch him go, with
little twisted smiles.... Poor Leah! Poor Anne!

All the love in him, that some sweet, gracious woman should have had,
was anesthetized, or it was deflected, perhaps, to the great
three-masted schooner he was now owner and master of, a beautiful boat
that had been christened the _Ulster Lady_, and came from the yards at
Belfast, taking the water as nobly as a swan. From truck to keelson
there was no part of her imperfect; from stem to stern. Barring a little
tendency to be cranky before the wind in a seaway, nothing better
sailed. Jammed, or on the wind, she was like a hare before the hounds,
so quickly did she go. Her slim black body, her white, beautifully set
sails--not a strake or an inch of canvas on her that he did not know and
love. And more thought was given by him to the proper peaking of a spar
and the exact setting of a leech than to the profits of the cargo. It
was like having one's own country, and his cabin aboard was like his own
castle--the little stateroom with the swinging-lamps, and the compass
above the fastened bed, the row of books, the Aberdeen terrier, _Duine
Uasal_, who slept peacefully on the rug, and who would go on deck and
sniff the wind like a connoisseur.... And there was a manuscript poem of
his father's in the Irish letter, _Leaba Luachra_, "The Bed of Rushes,"
which he had discovered and had framed. And there was a prized thing of
his boyhood there, a dagger the Young Pretender wore in his stocking,
and he in Highland dress, as he swung toward London with pipe and drum.
Alan Donn had given it to him, and he after getting it on a visit to
Argyll. "Not only is it Charlie's, but it's a nice handy thing, thon!"
... A beautiful piece of work it was, perfectly balanced, keen as a
razor, with a handle of the stag's horn.... It was the only weapon Shane
had, and about it curled romance and the smoke of dead, royal hopes....
A bonny, homy place that cabin, peaceful as a garden of bees, when the
water slipped past the