ter out of her dripping
garments in much the same fashion that he would have employed had she
been a half-drowned cat. In spite of her numbness Patsy saw the grim
humor of it all and came perilously near to a hysterical laugh. The
tinker unconsciously forestalled it by shouldering her, as if she had
been a whole bag of water-soaked cats, and carrying her up the
stairs. After looking into three rooms he deposited her on the
threshold of a fourth.

"It has the look of women folks; you're sure to find some left-behind
clothes o' theirs hanging up somewhere. Come down when you're dry an'
I'll have that fire waiting for you."

What followed was all a dream to Patsy's benumbed senses: the search
in drawers and closets for things to put on, and the finding of them;
the insistent aching of fingers and arms in trying to adjust them,
and the persistent refusal of brain to direct them with any degree of
intelligence. She came down the stairs a few minutes later, dragging
a bundle of wet clothes after her, and found the tinker kneeling by
the hearth, still in his dripping rags, and heaping more logs on the
already blazing fire.

He rose as she came toward him, took the clothes from her and dropped
them on the hearth. He seemed decidedly hazy and remote as he
brought a steamer rug from somewhere and wrapped it about her; his
voice, as he coaxed her over to the couch, apparently came from miles
away. As Patsy sank down, too weary to speak, the figure above her
took upon itself once more that suggestion of unearthliness that it
had worn when she had discovered it at dawn--hanging to the stump
fencing. For an instant the glow of the fire threw the profile into
the same shadowy outlines that the rising sun had first marked for
her; and the image lingered even after her eyes had closed.

"Sure, he's fading away like Oisiu, Gearoidh Iarla, and all of them
in the old tales," she thought, drowsily. "Like as not, when I open
my eyes again he'll be clear gone." This was where the dream ended
and complete oblivion began.

* * * * *

How long it lasted she could not have told; she only knew she was
awake at last and acutely conscious of everything about her; and that
she was warm--warm--warm! The room was dark except for the firelight;
but whether it was evening or night or midnight, she could not have
guessed. She found herself speculating in a hazy fashion where she
was, whose house they had broken into,