lovely. There is no writer can touch sir Walter Scott.

He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat often over his sad eyes.

Sadder to Stephen’s ear was his speech: a genteel accent, low and moist, marred by errors: and listening to it he wondered was the story true and was the thin blood that flowed in his shrunken frame noble and come of an incestuous love?

The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their green-white slime. They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his arm about his sister’s neck. A grey woollen cloak was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist: and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose redbrown hair and tender shapely strong freckled hands. Face. There was no face seen. The brother’s face was bent upon her fair rainfragrant hair. The hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was Davin’s hand.

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin who had called it forth. His father’s gibes at the Bantry gang leaped out of his memory. He held them at a distance and brooded uneasily on his own thought again. Why were they not Cranly’s hands? Had Davin’s simplicity and innocence stung him more secretly?

He walked on across the hall with Dixon, leaving Cranly to take leave elaborately of the dwarf.

Under the colonnade Temple was standing in the midst of a little group of students. One of them cried:

-Dixon, come over till you hear. Temple is in grand form.

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.

-You’re a hypocrite, O’Keeffe, he said, and Dixon’s a smiler. By hell, I think that’s a good literary expression.

He laughed slily, looking in Stephen’s face, repeating:

-By hell, I’m delighted with that name. A smiler.

A stout student who stood below them on the steps said:

-Come back to the mistress, Temple. We want to hear about that.

-He had, faith, Temple said. And he was a married man too. And all the priests used to be dining there. By hell, I think they all had a touch.

-We shall call it riding a hack to spare the hunter, said Dixon.

-Tell us, Temple, O’Keeffe said, how many quarts of porter have you in you?

-All your intellectual soul is in that phrase, O’Keeffe, said Temple with open scorn.

He moved with a shambling gait round the group and spoke to Stephen.

-Did you know that the Forsters are the kings of Belgium? he