ain; until at
last the shrill whistle of the small engine, announcing that her
destination was reached, swept everything but the incidents of the
moment from her consideration.

As the train stopped, she sprang to her feet and leaned out of the
window. How intensely familiar it was!--the narrow platform; the wooden
paling, behind which the incursion of summer visitors to Muskeere
congregated each day to watch the Cork trains arrive; the slovenly,
good-natured porter, absolutely unaltered by the passage of time!

Her thoughts swam, as she tried vainly to reconcile her own many
experiences with this amazing changelessness. Then all need for such
comparison was brushed aside, as a tall figure came striding down the
platform, followed by a couple of dogs; and she recognised Laurence
Asshlin.

Her first conscious thought was, "How fine-looking he has grown!" her
second, "How badly his clothes are made!" Then she laughed to herself
from happiness, and from that sense of comradeship and clannishness to
which the Irish nature is so susceptible.

"Larry!" she cried a moment later, as she threw the carriage door open.

But her dog Mick was the first to gain her side. Leaping forward at
sound of her voice, he sprang into the carriage, whimpering with joy.

"Mick!--darling Mick! Oh, you bad thing!" She laughed again
delightedly; then she turned, flushed and radiant, to greet her cousin.

"Hold him, Larry! That's better! Now, how are you?" She held out her
hand and laid it in Asshlin's disengaged one.

Larry flushed with excitement and embarrassment.

"How are you, Clo? You're awfully unchanged! Let me help you out! The
trap is waiting!"

As in a dream, she passed through the little station that had seemed so
large and imposing to her childish eyes in the time when a day's
shopping in Cork had represented the acme of adventure and enterprise;
but half-way down the narrow platform she paused.

"Oh, the sea, Larry!" she exclaimed, drawing in a long, deep
breath--"the heavenly smell of the sea!" Then she suddenly caught sight
of Burke, waiting, as he might have waited six years ago, beside the
high, old-fashioned trap.

"The same trap!" she said, with a little gasp.

Asshlin laughed.

"The same, only for a coat of varnish. But won't you speak to Tim?" He
added the last a trifle diffidently, with a shy glance at her costly
clothes and her general air of refinement and distinction.

Without a word she went forward.