Hyacinth and his friend advanced past the solicitor’s doors, and up the broad staircase as far as the drawing-room. For a time they got no further than the threshold. The opening of the door was greeted with a long-drawn and emphatic ‘Hush!’ from the company within. Maguire laid his hand on Hyacinth’s arm, and the two stood still looking into the room. What was left of the feeble autumn twilight was almost excluded by half-drawn curtains. No lamp was lit, and the fire cast only fitful rays here and there through the room. It was with difficulty that Hyacinth discerned figures in a semicircle, and a slim woman in a white dress standing apart from the others near the fire. Then he heard a voice, a singularly sweet voice, as it seemed to him, reciting with steady emphasis on the syllables which marked the rhythm of the poem: ‘Out there in the West, where the heavy gray clouds are insistent, Where the sky stoops to gather the earth into mournful embraces, Where the country lies saturate, sodden, round saturate hamlets-- ‘Out there in the sunset where rages and surges Atlantic, And the salt is commingled with rain over desolate beaches, Thy heart, O beloved, is still beating--fitfully, feebly. ‘Is beating--ah! not as it beat in the squadrons of Sarafield, Exultantly, joyously, gladly, expectant of battle, With throbs like the notes of the drums when men gather for fighting. ‘Beats still; but, ah! not as it beat in the latest Fitzgerald, Nobly devote to his race’s most noble tradition; Or in Emmet or Davis, or, last on their list, in O’Brien. ‘Beats fitfully, feebly. O desolate mother! O Erin! When shall the pulse of thy life, which but flutters in Connaucht, Throb through thy meadows and boglands, and mountains and cities?’ A subdued murmur of applause greeted the close of the recitation, and praise more sincere than that with which politeness generally greets the drawing-room performances of minor poets. Hyacinth joined in neither. It seemed to him that the verses were too beautiful to speak about, so sacred that praise was a kind of sacrilege. Perhaps some excuse may be found for his emotion in the fact that for weeks he had heard no poetry except the ode about ‘wiping something off a slate.’ The violence of the contrast benumbed his critical faculty. So a man who was obliged to gaze for a long time at the new churches erected in Belfast might afterwards catch himself in the act of admiring the houses which the Congested Districts Board builds in Connaught. ‘I am afraid I must have bored you.’ It was Miss O’Dwyer who greeted him. ‘I didn’t see you and Mr. Maguire come in until I had commenced my poor little poem. I ought to have given you some tea before I inflicted it on you.’ ‘Oh,’ said Hyacinth, ‘it was beautiful. Is it really your own? Did you write it?’