. . Can I see your sister for a few
minutes?'

'It is quite impossible; and my mother desires me to say that she is
very much surprised that you should come here. . . . We know all about your
attempt to induce Olive to leave her home.'

'Then she has told you? But if you knew how I love her, you would not
blame me. What else could I do? Your mother would not let me see her,
and she was very unhappy at home; you did not know this, but I did, and
if luck hadn't been against me--Ah! but what's the use in talking of
luck; luck was against me, or she would have been my wife now. And what
a little thing suffices to blight a man's happiness in life; what a
little, oh, what a little!' he said, speaking in a voice full of
bitterness; and he buried his face in his hands.

Alice's eyes as she looked at him were expressive of her thoughts--they
beamed at once with pity and admiration. He was but the ordinary
handsome young man that in England nature seems to reproduce in
everlasting stereotype. Long graceful legs, clad in tight-fitting
trousers, slender hips rising architecturally to square wide shoulders,
a thin strong neck and a tiny head--yes, a head so small that an artist
would at once mark off eight on his sheet of double elephant. And now he
lay over the back of a chair weeping like a child; in the intensity of
his grief he was no longer commonplace; and as Alice looked at this
superb animal thrown back in a superb abandonment of pose, her heart
filled with the natural pity that the female feels always for the male
in distress, and the impulse within her was to put her arms about him
and console him; and then she understood her sister's passion for him,
and her mind formulated it thus: 'How handsome he is! Any girl would
like a man like that.' And as Alice surrendered herself to those
sensuous, or rather romantic feelings, her nature quickened to a sense
of pleasure, and she grew gentler with him, and was glad to listen while
he sobbed out his sorrows to her.

'Oh, why,' he exclaimed, 'did she fall over that thrice-accursed stile!
In five minutes more we would have been in each other's arms, and for
ever. I had a couple of the best post-horses in Gort; they'd have taken
us to Athenry in a couple of hours, and then--Oh! what luck, what
luck!'

'But do you not know that Olive met Mrs. Lawler in the wood, and that it
was she who--'

'What do you say? You don't mean to tell me that it was Mrs. Lawler who
prevented Olive