eyes, and arms warm as sunshine, and a bosom where a boy might
rest his head for a moment after the great harshness of the strange
places.

But the kindliness came not from her. It came from Robin More, who ran
down the garden faster than his dignity should have allowed him. "Are
you all right, wee Shane? Is everything all right with you? You're
looking fine, but you haven't been sick, wee fellow? Tell me, you
haven't been sick?" Or from Alan Donn, with his great snort of
laughter: "Christ! are you home again? And all the good men that's been
lost at sea! Well, the devil's childer have the devil's luck. Eigh,
laddie, gie's a feel o' ye. _A Righ_--O King of Graces, but you're the
lean pup! Morag, Nellie, Cassie, some tea! and be damned quick about
it!"

And then his mother would come into the room, like a cold wind or a thin
ghost, and there would be a kiss on the cheek, a cold, precise peck,
like a bird's. And, "Did you have a good voyage?" just as if she said,
"Do you think we'll have rain?"

Oh, well, to hell with it! as Alan Donn said when he flubbed his
approach to the last green for some championship or other. "What you
never had, you never lost!"

Aye, true indeed. What you never had you couldn't very well lose. Aye,
there was a lot in that. Just so; but--

Boys do be thinking long....

Section 6

Because his Uncle Alan was in Scotland somewhere shooting deer and would
not be home for several days, and because Uncle Robin was in Paris, and
because the _Goban Saor_ put into Dundalk to take a cargo of unbleached
linen, young Shane decided to stay there for a few days before
proceeding northward to the Antrim Glens. He felt he couldn't face the
house at Cushendu with his cold, precise mother alone there, so he
accepted the hospitality of an apprentice friend.

It was at a country barn dance during these few days that he met Moyra
Dolan.

A tallish, tawny-haired woman with the dead-white skin that goes with
reddish hair, with steel for eyes, there was a grace and carriage to her
that put her aside from the other peasant girls as a queen may
masquerade as a slave and yet betray herself as a queen. Other girls
there were as pretty, with their hair like flax and their eyes like blue
water; with hair like a dim blue cloud and eyes like a smudge of
charcoal. But none had her teeth, her small ankles, her long, sensitive
hands. Some strain of the Stuart cavaliers had crept into that hardy
peasant stock on the