of the sky, the romance of the clouds.  But she was bent on hearing of the invisible world apparently always so visible to him, and she tried to win his thoughts away from the park, and to lead him to speak of his visions.  She did not know if she believed in them, but she pined for exaltation, for, an unloosening of the materialistic terror in which Owen had tied her, and in this mood Ulick’s dreams floated up in her life, like clouds in a cloudless sky.  He sat talking, lost in his dreams, and she sat listening like one enchanted.  Now their talk had strayed from the descriptions of visions beheld by folk who lived in back parlours in Bloomsbury squares to the philosophy of his own belief; and she smiled for delight at seeing the Druid in him.  The ancient faiths had survived in him, and it seemed natural and even right that he should believe that after death men pass to the great plain of the land over the sea, the land of the children of Dana.  Men lived there, he said, for a while, enjoying all their desires, and at the end of this period they are born again.  Man lives between two desires—­his desire of spiritual peace and happiness, and his desire of earthly experience.

“Oh, how true that is!”

“Man’s desire of earthly experience,” Ulick continued, “draws him to re-birth, and he is born into a form that fits his nature as a glove fits a hand; the soul of a warrior passes into the robust form of a warrior; the soul of a poet into the most sensitive body of a poet; so you see how modern science has only robbed the myths of their beauty.”

He spoke of the old Irish legend of Mongan and the Bard, and Evelyn begged of him to tell it her.

“Mongan,” he said, “had been Fin MacCool two hundred years before.  When he was Fin he had been present at the death of a certain king.  The bard was singing before Mongan, and mis-stated the place of the king’s death.  Mongan corrected him, and the Bard was so incensed at the correction that he threatened to satirise the kingdom so that it should become barren.  And he would only agree to withhold his terrible satire if Mongan would give him his wife.

“Mrs. Mongan?”

“Yes, just so,” Ulick replied, laughing.  “Mongan asked for three days’ delay to consider the dreadful dilemma in which the Bard’s threat had placed him.  And during that time Mongan sat with his wife consoling her, saying, “A man will come to us, his feet are already upon the western sea.”  And at the time when the Bard stood up to claim the wife, a strange warrior came into the encampment, holding a barbless spear.  He said that he was Caolte, one of Fin’s famous warriors, that the king whose place of death was in dispute was killed where Mongan had said, that if they dug down into the earth they would find the spear-head, that it would fit the shaft he held in his hand, that it was the spear-head that had killed the king.”

“Go on, and tell me some more stories.  I love to listen to you—­you are better than any play.”