The young man from Houghton County, strolling along behind these three men, all so busily occupied with one another, had, of a sudden, conceived the notion of dropping silently out of the party.

He had put the idea into execution and was secure from observation on the farther side of the ditch, before the question of what he should do next shaped itself in his mind. Indeed, it was not until he had made his way to the little old-fashioned pier and come to an enforced halt among the empty barrels, drying nets and general marine odds and ends which littered the landing-stage, that he knew what purpose had brought him hither.

But he perceived it now with great clearness. What other purpose, in truth, did existence itself contain for him?

“I want to be rowed over at once to that vessel there,” he called out to John Pat, who made one of a group of Muirisc men, in white jackets and soft black hats, standing beneath him on the steps. As he descended and took his seat in one of the waiting dingeys, he noted other clusters of villagers along the shore, all concentrating an eager interest upon the yawl-rigged craft which lay at anchor in the harbor. They pointed to it incessant as they talked, and others could be seen running forward across the green to join them. He had never supposed Muirisc capable of such a display of animation.

“The people seem tickled to death to get The O’Mahony back again,” he remarked to John Pat, as they shot out under the first long sweep of the oars.

“They are, sir,” was the stolid response.

“Did your brother come back with him—that one-armed man who went after him—Malachy, I think they called him?”

“He did, sur,” said Pat, simply.

“Well”—Bernard bent forward impatiently—“tell me about it! Where did he find him? What do people say?”

“They do be saying manny things,” responded the oarsman, rounding his shoulders to the work.

Bernard abandoned the inquiry, with a grunt of discouragement, and contented himself perforce by watching the way in which the strange craft waxed steadily in size as they sped toward her. In a minute or two more, he was alongside and clambering up a rope-ladder, which dangled its ends in the gently heaving water.

Save for a couple of obviously foreign sailors lolling in the sunshine upon a sail in the bows, there was no one on deck. As he looked about, however, in speculation, the apparition of a broad, black hat, with long, curled plumes, rose above the companionway. He welcomed it with an exclamation of delight, and ran forward with outstretched hands.

The wearer of the hat, as she stepped upon the deck and confronted this demonstration, confessed to surprise by stopping short and lifting her black brows in inquiry. Bernard sheepishly let his hands fall to his side before the cool glance with which she regarded him.

“Is it viewing the vessel you are?” she asked. “Her jigger lug-sail is unusual, I’m told.”

The young man’s blue eyes glistened in reproachful appeal.

“What do I know about lugger jig-sails, or care, either,” he asked. “I hurried here the moment I heard, to—to see you!”

“’T is flattered I am, I’m sure,” said Kate, dryly, looking away from him to the brown cliffs beyond.

“Come, be fair!” Bernard pleaded. “Tell me what the matter is. I thought I had every reason to suppose you’d be glad to see me. It’s plain enough that you are not; but you—you might tell me why. Or no,” he went on, with a sudden change of tone, “I won’t ask you. It’s your own affair, after all. Only you’ll excuse the way I rushed up to you. I’d had my head full of your affairs for days past, and then your disappearance—they thought you were drowned, you know—and I—I—”

The young man broke off with weak inconclusiveness, and turned as if to descend the ladder again. But John Pat had rowed away with the boat, and he looked blankly down upon the clear water instead.

Kate’s voice sounded with a mellower tone behind him.

“I wouldn’t have ye go in anger,” she said.

Bernard wheeled around in a flash.

“Anger!” he cried, with a radiant smile chasing all the shadows from his face. “Why, how on earth could I be angry with you? No; but I was going away most mightily down in the mouth, though—that is,” he added, with a rueful kind of grin, “if my boat hadn’t gone off without me. But, honestly, now, when I drove in here this morning from Skibbereen, I felt like a victorious general coming home from the wars. I’d done everything I wanted to do. I had the convent business blocked, and I had O’Daly on the hip; and I said to myself, as we drove along: ‘She’ll be glad to see me.’ I kept saying that all the while, straight from Skibbereen to Muirisc. Well, then—you can guess for yourself—it was like tumbling backward into seven hundred feet of ice-water!”

Kate’s face had gradually lost its implacable rigidity, and softened now for an instant into almost a smile.

“So much else has happened since that drive of yours,” she said gently. “And what were ye doing at Skibbereen?”

“Well, you’ll open your eyes!” predicted Bernard, all animation once again; and then he related the details of his journey to Skibbereen and Cashel, of his interviews with the prelates and of the manner in which he had, so to speak, wound up the career of the convent of the Hostage’s Tears. “It hadn’t had any real, rightdown legitimate title to existence, you know,” he concluded, “these last five hundred years. All it needed was somebody to call attention to this fact, you see, and, bang, the whole thing collapsed like a circus-tent in a cyclone!”

The girl had moved over to the gunwale, and now leaning over the rail, looked meditatively into the water below.

“And so,” she said, with a pensive note in her voice, “there’s an end to the historic convent of the O’Mahonys! No other family in Ireland had one—’t was the last glory of our poor, hunted and plundered and poverty-striken race; and now even that must depart from us.”

“Well—hang it all!” remonstrated Bernard—“it’s better that way than to have you locked up all your life. I feel a little blue myself about closing up the old convent, but there’s something else I feel a thousand times more strongly about still.”

“Yes—isn’t it wonderful?—the return of The O’Mahony!” said Kate. “Oh, I hardly know still if I’m waking or not. ’T was all like a blessid vision, and ’t was supernatural in its way; I’ll never believe otherwise. There was I on the strand yonder, with the talisman he’d given me in me arms, praying for his return—and, behold you there was this boat of his forninst me! Oh! Never tell me the age of miracles is past?”

“I won’t—I promise you!” said Bernard, with fervor. “I’ve seen one myself since I’ve been here. It was at the Three Castles. I had my gun raised to shoot a heron, when an enchanted fairy—”

“Nothing to do but he’d bring me on board,” Kate put in, hastily. “Old Murphy swam out to him ahead of us, screaming wid delight like one possessed. And we sat and talked for hours—he telling strange stories of the war’s he’d been in wid the French, and thin wid Don Carlos, and thin the Turks, and thin wid some outlandish people in a Turkish province—until night fell, and he wint ashore. And whin he came back he brought O’Daly wid him—where in the Lord’s name he found him passes my understanding, and thin we up sail and beat down till we stood off Three Castle Head. There we lay all night—O’Mahony gave up his cabin to me—and this morning back we came again. And now—the Lord be praised!—there’s an ind to all our throubles!”

“Well,” said Bernard, with deliberation, “I’m glad. I really am glad. Although, of course, it’s plain enough to see, there’s an end to me, too.”

A brief time of silence passed, as the two, leaning side by side on the rail, watched the slow rise and sinking of the dull-green wavelets.

“You’re off to Ameriky, thin?” Kate finally asked, without looking up.

The young man hesitated.

“I don’t know yet,” he said, slowly. “I’ve got a curious hand dealt out to me. I hardly know how to play it. One thing is sure, though: hearts are trumps.”
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