ve and where his work must lie. For the events of the
afternoon had summoned a new self into being, a self unfamiliar, but
real and terribly insistent, demanding recognition. He could not analyse
the change that had come to him, nor could he account for it. He did not
try to. He lived again those great moments when, having been thrust by
chance into the command of these fifty mighty men, he had swung them
to victory. He remembered the ease, the perfect harmony with which his
faculties had wrought through those few minutes of fierce struggle.
Again he passed through the awful ordeal of the operation, now holding
the light, now assisting with forceps or cord or needle, now sponging
away that ghastly red flow that could not be stemmed. He wondered now at
his self-mastery. He could see again his fingers, bloody, but unshaking,
handing the old doctor a needle and silk cord. He remembered his
surprise and pity, almost contempt, for big Tom Magee lying on the
floor unable to lift his head; remembered, too, the strange absence of
anything like elation at the doctor's words, "My boy, you have the nerve
and the fingers of a surgeon, and that's what your Maker intended you to
be."

But he let his mind linger long and with thrilling joy through the
interlude in the dance. Every detail of that scene stood clearly limned
before his mind. The bare skeleton of the new harp, the crowding,
eager, tense faces of the listeners, his mother's and Margaret's in
the hindmost row, his brother standing in the centre foreground, the
upturned face of the singer with its pale romantic loveliness, all
in the mystery of the moonlight, and, soaring over all, that clear,
vibrant, yet softly passionate, glorious voice. That was the final magic
touch that rolled back the screen and set before him the new world which
must henceforth be his. He could not explain that touch. The songs were
the old simple airs worn threadbare by long use in the countryside. It
was certainly not the songs. Nor was it the singer. Curiously enough,
the girl, her personality, her character, worthy or unworthy, had only a
subordinate place in his thought. He was conscious of her presence there
as a subtle yet powerful influence, but as something detached from
the upturned face illumined in the soft moonlight and the stream of
heart-shaking song. She was to him thus far simply a vision and a voice,
to which all the psychic element in him made eager response. As he drove
into the q