and fleet-winged fancy had sent him back to the den of
the Jean, and he was in the dusk of the ship's interior listening to a
girl's song, moved more profoundly than when he had been actually
there by some message in the notes, some soothing passionate melancholy
without relation to the words or to the tune, some inexplicable and
mellow vibration he had felt first as he stood, a child, on the road
from Kilmalieu, and a bird solitary in the winds, lifting with curious
tilt of feathers over the marshy field, had piped dolorously some
mystery of animal life man must have lost when he ceased to sleep stark
naked to the stars. In his mind he traced the baffling accent, failing
often to come upon it, anon finding it fill all his being with an
emotion he had never known before.

Miss Mary was now more alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and
his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison
of sluggish men's voices, women's eager earnest shrilling. It was as if
he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the
side a little to touch him and assure herself he was there.

And that awakened him! He listened with his workaday ears to separate
from the clamour, as he once had done, the thread of golden melody. For
a moment he was amazed and disappointed; no unusual voice was there. If
Miss Nan was behind him, she was taking only a mute part in the praise,
amused mildly perhaps--he could not blame--by this rough contrast with
the more tuneful praise she was accustomed to elsewhere.

And then--then he distinguished her I No, he was wrong; no, he was
right, there it was again, not so loud and clear as he had expected, but
yet her magic, unmistakably, as surely as when first it sounded to
him in "The Rover" and "The Man with the Coat of Green." A thrill went
through him. He rose at the close of the psalm, and trod upon clouds
more airily, high-breastedly, uplifted triumphantly, than Ronaig of Gaul
who marched, in the story, upon plunging seas from land to land.

"He has been eating something wrong," concluded Miss Mary, finding
ease of a kind in so poor an excuse for her darling's perturbation. It
accounted to her for all his odd behaviour during the remainder of the
service, for his muteness in the psalmody, his restless disregard of the
sermon, his hurry to be out of the straight-backed, uncomfortable pew.

As he stood to his feet to follow the Paymaster she ventured a hand
from behi