the fact
that it would be hard for any man to see so much grace and beauty and
remain insensible. Caius sat by this woman's hearth, and whittled tops
and boats for her children on the sunny doorstep when the days grew
warm at noon, and did not expect any guerdon for doing it except the
rest that he found in the proximity and occupation. Reward came to him,
however. The woman eyed him with more and more kindliness, and at length
she spoke.

It was one day towards the end of the month, when the last film of snow
had evaporated from many a field and slope, and the vivid green of grass
appeared for the first time to gladden the eyes, although many an
ice-wreath and snowy hollow still lay between. On such a day the sight
of a folded head of saxifrage from which the pearls are just breaking
makes the heart of man bound with a pleasure that has certainly no
rational cause which is adequate.

Caius came up from the western shore, where he had been watching a
distant ship that passed on the other side of the nearer ice-floes, and
which said, by no other signal than that of her white sails, that winter
was gone. The sea, whose rivers and lakes among the ice had of late
looked so turbid by reason of frozen particles in the water, was clear
now to reflect once more the blue above it, and the ice-cakes were very
white in the sunshine. Caius turned his back upon this, and came up a
stony path where large patches of the hill were green; and by chance he
came upon O'Shea's wife, who was laying out linen to bleach at some
distance from her own house. Close to her Caius saw the ledge of rock on
which the first flowers of the year were budding, and straightway fell
in love with them. Knowing that their plants would flourish indoors as
well as out, he stooped to lift the large cakes of moss in which their
roots were set. The woman, who wore a small pink shawl tied over her
head and shoulders, came near to where he was stooping, and made no
preface, but said:

"He's dead, sir; or if he isn't, and if he should come back, O'Shea will
kill him!"

Caius did not need to ask of whom she spoke.

"Why?" he asked. "Why should O'Shea want to kill him?"

"It would kill her, sir, if he came back to her. She couldn't abide him
no ways, and O'Shea says it's as good one murder should be done as
another, and if he was hung for it he wouldn't mind. O'Shea's the sort
of man that would keep his word. He'd just feel it was a kind of
interesting thing t