She took us one day into the Carmelite church at Kensington, and Brand and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us. And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said, “Drat the thing!” when she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door. “Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened the door. “I shall forget my head one day.” “Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you, at all, at all.” Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of Heaven. Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she swept off the sofa with a careless hand. “Won’t you take a seat then?” I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when Eileen was all those years under German rule. “Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille as to London.” Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,” and two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name. “The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I was out of it entirely when he had her by his side.” “You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.” Eileen answered him. “Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty novels which keep her from ascending straight to Heaven without the necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that the truth I’m after talking, Mother o’ mine?” “I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you have with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.” They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham Brand had asked her, and not Elsa von Kreuzenach, to be his wife. That was an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to France, and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of meeting Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each minute seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette, and I saw that his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain. VI