ack
with the dead man's chest, touched him inwardly to a brief delirium.
The room all at once seemed to fill with the tramping of men and the
shrilling of pipers, with ships, quays, tumultuous towns, camps, and all
the wonders or the shepherds' battle stories round the fire, and he was
in a field, and it was the afternoon with a blood-red sky beyond the
fir-trees, dense smoke floating across it and the cries of men cutting
each other down. He saw--so it seemed as he stood in the middle of the
floor of the little parlour with the crumbs of his dinner still upon
his vest--the stiff figure of a fallen man in a high collar like the
man portrayed upon the wall, and his hand was still in the hilt of a
reddened sword and about him were the people he had slain. That did not
much move the boy, but he was stirred profoundly when he saw the sword
come home. He saw Miss Mary open out the chest in the kitchen and pull
hard upon the hilt of the weapon, and he saw her face when the terrible
life-glut revealed itself like a rust upon the blade. His nostrils
expanded, his eyes glistened; Miss Mary hurriedly looked at him with
curiosity, for his breath suddenly quickened and strained till it was
the loudest sound in the room.

"What is it, dear?" she said kindly, putting a hand upon his shoulder,
speaking the Gaelic that any moment of special fondness brought always
to her lips.

"I do not know," said he, ashamed. "I was just thinking of your brother
who did not come home, and of your taking out his sword."

She looked more closely at him, at the flush that crept below the fair
skin of his neck and more than common paleness of his cheek. "I think,"
said she, "I am going to like you very much. I might be telling my poor
story of a sword to Captain John there a hundred times, and he could not
once get at the innermost meaning of it for a woman's heart."

"I saw the battle," said he, encouraged by a sympathy he had never known
before.

"I know you did," said she.

"And I saw him dead."

"_Ochame!_"

"And I saw you dropping the sword when you tugged it from the scabbard,
and you cried out and ran and washed your hands, though they were quite
clean."

"Indeed I did I," said Miss Mary, all trembling as the past was so
plainly set before her. "You are uncanny--no, no, you are not uncanny,
you are only ready-witted, and you know how a sister would feel when
her dead brother's sword was brought back to her, and the blood of the
broth