He and Tishy were going to London, and if this gale lasted, they would have a devil of a crossing.  He wondered if Tishy were a good sailor.  He wasn’t, anyhow.  He would warn her that he would be no more use to her than a sick headache, which she would probably have, to start with, and she wouldn’t want another.  The Mount Music people were across the Channel by this time, ahead of the gale too.  Luck for them!  Old Mrs. Twomey had told him they were gone, and she said they would never come back again.  Silly old ass, what did she know about it?

He had wandered into his studio; now, without his own volition, almost as if he were hypnotised, he took the canvas on which he had painted Christian, from where it was leaning, face inwards, against the wall, and put it on an easel.  He had not looked at it since the day of conflict, and he told himself that he was now regarding it with the frigid rye of the art critic.

Yes, it was good.  Better than he thought.  The technique was jolly good, slick, and unworried, and the likeness was all right too.  He had somehow just got hold of that ethereal look she always had had.  She was hearing those voices they used to chaff her about.  How she had gone for John one day, when he began ragging her about that old hymn!  She always had the pluck of the devil!  He frowned.  She hadn’t had pluck enough to stand up to her father!  He would look at her picture no longer.  He wouldn’t think of her.  She had chucked him.  But his eyes were held by the eyes that he had painted; with a rush, the thought of her possessed him.  She was everywhere, penetrating his very being, “his heart in her hands”; he shook in the grip of remembrance, almost of realisation, of her presence.  For a moment, Time stood still for him; he hung, like a ship that has been flung up into the wind, trembling.  Then the sails filled, the present re-asserted itself.  He was going to marry Tishy Mangan, and Christian had chucked him.  He turned the canvas again.

Why had he thought of that beastly hymn?  It had got hold of him now!  The measured tramp of the tune fitted itself to the tick of the clattering little tin clock on the studio chimney-piece.

  “How the troops of Mid-ian,
  Prowl, and prowl around! 
  Christian!  Up and at them—­”

No, that was what the Duke of Wellington said to the Guards at—­Oh, damn the clock, anyhow!  He caught it up, and pitched it across the room on to a sofa, and hurled a bundle of draperies after it and on top of it.  But the tune would not stop, and the muffled, unbaffled tick of the clock went on.  He swung out of the studio, and went back to the hall.

The house had its back to the storm, and it was only when he looked down the Cluhir avenue, that he realised with what fury the rain was falling.  The wind had moderated a little, but the barograph-needle was still almost off the paper it had gone so low.  It was only eleven o’clock.  Two hours before the motor was to come for him.  He felt, as he told himself, using the adjective that has had to undertake the duties of so many others, rotten.  Empty and rather sick, and, well, generally beastly—­a sort of vague funk.  Yes, by Jove!  He was in a regular blue funk!  That was what was wrong with him. (But he certainly felt sick too.)