When Ellen Miscal left him, Martin Cosgrave stood very quietly looking through the cut-stone tracery window.  The beech trees were swaying slowly outside.  Their music was in his ears.

Then he remembered that he was standing in the room where he would take Rose Dempsey in his arms.  It was here he would tell her of all the bitter things he had locked up in his heart when she had gone away from him.  It was here he would tell her of the day of resurrection, when all the bitter thoughts had burst into flower at the few words that told of her return.  It was that day of great tumult within him that thought of the building had come into his mind.

When Martin Cosgrave walked out of the room the carpenter and a neighbour boy were arguing about something at the foot of the stairs.

“It’s too steep, I’m telling you,” the boy was saying.

“What do you know about it?”

“I know this much about it, that if a little child came running down that stairs he’d be apt to fall and break his neck.”

Then the two men went out, still arguing.

Martin Cosgrave sat down on one of the steps of the stairs.  A child running down the steps!  His child!  A child bearing his name!  He would be prattling about the building.  He would run across that landing, swaying and tottering.  His little voice would fill the building.  Arms would be reaching out to him.  They would be the soft white arms of Rose Dempsey, or maybe, they would be the arms that raised up the building—­his own strong arms.  Or it might be that he would be carrying down the child and handing him over the rails there into the outspread arms of Rose Dempsey.  She would be reaching out for the child with the newly-kindled light of motherhood in her eyes, the passion of a young mother in her welcoming voice.  A child with his very name—­a child that would grow up to be a man and hand down the name to another, and so on during the generations.  And with the name would go down the building, the building that would endure, that would live, that was immortal.  Did it all come to him as a sudden revelation, springing from the idle talk of a neighbour boy brought up to work from one season to another?  Or was it the same thing that was behind the forces that had fired him while he had worked at the building?  Had it not all come into his life the evening he stood among his fields with his eyes on the crest of the hill?

Ah, there had been a great building surely, a building standing up on the hill, a great, a splendid building raised up to the sight of all the world, and with it a greater building, a building raised up from the sight of all men, the building of a name, the moulding of hearts that would beat while Time was, a building of immortal souls, a building into which God would breathe His breath, a building which would be heard of in Heaven, among the angels, through all the eternities, a building living on when all the light was gone out of the sun, when oceans were as if they had never been, a name, a building, living when the story of all the worlds and all the generations would be held written upon a scroll in the lap of God....  The face of the dreamer as he abandoned himself to his thoughts was pallid with a half-fanatical emotion.