“But since the first time I saw you, standing in the crowd with another girl, while I was addressing a strike meeting, I knew I could trust you. I remember thinking as I saw your face, that you were the woman for me. It was queer and I can’t explain it. Something in your face told me that you were my woman. It’s very queer, that. You see thousands of faces every day. There is something queer and mysterious in them all, something suspicious and hostile. Then you see one face that you have been looking for all your life as it were. There is nothing hidden or mysterious in that face. It can hold nothing hidden from you. It’s queer. I haven’t worked it out yet. It’s in the eyes, I think. The eyes are the doors of the mind. But I haven’t worked it out yet. But what am I talking about? It’s a sure sign that I’m worried when I ramble off like this. I talk to myself in my room, for want of a listener, when I’m up against it. I talk all night, sitting up in bed, with a pistol in my hand.” He lowered his voice and smiled with his lips, while his eyes glittered. He looked at her for a moment. “If the boys knew that I get the wind up now and again, they wouldn’t be afraid of me. And then. . . .” He drew his hand across his windpipe. “Sure. That’s what keeps me safe. They are afraid of me. That’s all it is. It’s not love. Oh no. I wouldn’t have it, anyway. There’s nothing like fear. Nobody loves me. Not even that slobber of a fellow Hackett, who stooped down one day on the quays to tie my shoelace. He’d die for me, but only because he believes I’m cold and hard and callous and that I could shoot him dead without a quiver of an eyelid. You see . . . he’s the opposite from . . . There you are, Mary. Good God! I must be very bad to-night. I’m wandering. Mary, does your right knee tremble and you can’t stop it?” “Dan, Dan,” cried Mary, seizing his right knee in both her hands, “don’t worry. Don’t worry, Dan.” She began to rub the knee. “That’s nothing. My father often gets it. It’s only nerve tension. A nurse out of the Mater Hospital told me all about it. You can live to be a hundred with it. She says it’s due to tea drinking. But . . . Dan, why are you so hard and cynical all of a sudden about everything? Can’t you give it all up and settle down? You said you——” “Settle down?” cried Gallagher, jumping to his feet and looking at her fiercely, as if she had suggested a heinous crime. “Give it up! How do you mean? Pooh! Women, women, women! You don’t understand that it’s my life. It’s my life, I say. You might as well tell me stop breathing and . . . After all . . .” He seemed to think of something startlingly unexpected, for he looked at her with open lips. He continued, shyly almost, in a scarcely audible voice, as if he were soliloquizing. “After all, you weren’t affected the way I expected you would be. You would never understand. You would never join me in the way . . . Hm! I see.”