"I have," O'Hara retorted, "so it's no use sermonising. I have made up my mind to marry Gabrielle, and nothing on earth will deter me." "Do you know her people, or anything about them?" Menzies ventured. O'Hara laughed. "No," he said, "but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. I shouldn't care whether her father was a navvy or a publican, or whether her mother took in washing and pinched a few odd shirts and socks now and again, only as it happens, they don't affect the question at all, because they are both dead. Gabrielle is an orphan--quite on her own--so I am perfectly safe as far as that goes. No pompous papa to consult, no cantankerous old mother-in-law to dread. Gabrielle was educated at a convent school, and, though you may laugh, knows next to nothing of the world. She's as innocent as a butterfly. We are to be married next month." Finding that it was no earthly use to say any more on the subject, just then at all events, Menzies changed the conversation and referred to the incident of the old woman. O'Hara at once became interested. "Why," he said, "from your description she must have been one of the Banshees that is supposed to haunt our family, and which my mother always declared she saw shortly before my father's death. A hideous hag with a shock head of tow-coloured hair, who stood on the staircase laughing devilishly, and then, all at once, vanished. She is known as the bad Banshee to distinguish her from the good one, which is, so I have always been led to understand, very beautiful, but which never manifests itself, saving when anything especially dreadful is going to happen to an O'Hara." Feeling very uneasy in his mind, Menzies now bid his friend good night, and went home. After that days passed and Menzies saw nothing of O'Hara, until one evening, when he was thinking it must be about now that the marriage was to take place, O'Hara turned up at his flat, and proposed that they should go for a stroll in the direction of the fortifications near Montsouris. But O'Hara was not in his usual good spirits; he seemed very glum and depressed, and Menzies gathered that there had been occasional differences of opinion between his friend and Gabrielle, and that the affair was not running quite as smoothly as it might. Gabrielle had a great many admirers, one of them very rich, and O'Hara was obviously very much annoyed at the attentions they had been bestowing on his fiancée, and at the manner in which she had received them. But there was something else, too; something he could see in his friend's face and manner, but which O'Hara would not so much as hint at. Menzies was, of course, pleased, for there now seemed to be a glimmer of hope that these frictions would materialise into something stronger and more definite, and lead to a rupture that would be final.