of those men who gnaw the ends of their moustaches, and have behind them the remembrance of a fearful life. My name was Dare Stamer, or Paul Le Mesurier, and my heart was sombre and volcanic. The plot of our romance did not vary a great deal. We met; we loved; we quarrelled. I married somebody else――a cold, soulless, blonde beauty with magnificent shoulders――and Katherine sometimes went into a consumption, and sometimes did not, but in either case there was a last meeting between us, when the veils of falsehoods were torn aside, and for one wild, mad, delirious moment I held her in my arms, my lips pressed on hers. It was these wild, mad, delirious moments that so appealed to me. They followed one another thick and fast as rain-drops in a thunder-shower. I was ever at a climax. The room was brimmed up with lovers’ tears and lovers’ kisses, meetings and partings, yet never perhaps had the text above my head, though I was far from thinking so, been obeyed so literally and so successfully. CHAPTER VIII I was wakened in the morning by Tony scratching at my door. Still half-asleep, I got up to let him in, and then returned to bed, where he had already taken the most comfortable place. He looked at me for a moment or two and then closed his round, dark, innocent eyes till they showed only as two slits of dim silver, and set up a loud snoring. I was too lazy to get up, and lay idly watching him. He had a curious and expressive beauty, resembling that of some wonderful piece of Chinese porcelain, at once bizarre and attractive. There was something quaint about him, an adorable simplicity. In colour he was white, decorated with brindle patches. Leonardo would have made a drawing of him, would have delighted in the superb limbs and wide deep chest, the big, broad, heavy, wrinkled head, with its massive, low-hanging jaw, its upturned, flat, black nose, its silky ears, like the petals of a rose, and those dark, lovely eyes, in which, when he was at rest, a profound melancholy floated. As a pup, able to walk and no more, he had been a birthday present from Mrs. Carroll: now he weighed about sixty pounds and was three years old. As I watched him I tried to make up my mind whether I should say anything further about going to Derryaghy. In spite of all last night’s bravery I knew well enough that, when it came to the point, it was really rather impossible deliberately to disobey my father; and, what is more, that I shouldn’t want to do so. I somehow kept seeing the thing from his point of view, and this irritated me, because it made me powerless to do anything but sit at home and sulk.