‘Was it Clonmell?’ asked Miss Macrae, letting him take her hand.

He pressed it against his burning brow.

‘Though you laugh at me,’ said Blake, ’sometimes you are kind!  I am upset—­I hardly know myself.  What is yonder shape skirting the lawn?  Is it the Daoine Sidh?’

’Why do you call her “the downy she”?  She is no more artful than other people.  She is my maid, Elspeth Mackay,’ answered Miss Macrae, puzzled.  They were alone, separated from the others by the breadth of the roof.

‘I said the Daoine Sidh,’ replied the poet, spelling the words.  ’It means the People of Peace.’

‘Quakers?’

‘No, the fairies,’ groaned the misunderstood bard.  ’Do you know nothing of your ancestral tongue?  Do you call yourself a Gael?’

‘Of course I call myself a girl,’ answered Miss Macrae.  ’Do you want me to call myself a young lady?’

The poet sighed.  ‘I thought you understood me,’ he said.  ’Ah, how to escape, how to reach the undiscovered West!’

‘But Columbus discovered it,’ said Miss Macrae.

‘The undiscovered West of the Celtic heart’s desire,’ explained the bard; ’the West below the waters!  Thither could we twain sail in the magic boat of Bran!  Ah see, the sky opens like a flower!’

Indeed, there was a sudden glow of summer lightning.

‘That looks more like rain,’ said Merton, who was standing with the Budes at an opposite corner of the roof.

‘I say, Merton,’ asked Bude, ’how can you be so uncivil to that man?  He took it very well.’

‘A rotter,’ said Merton.  ’He has just got that stuff by heart, the verse and a lot of the prose, out of a book that I brought down myself, and left in the smoking-room.  I can show you the place if you like.’

‘Do, Mr. Merton.  But how foolish you are! do be civil to the man,’ whispered Lady Bude, who shared his disbelief in Blake; and at that moment the tinkle of an electric bell in the smoking-room below reached the expectant ears of Mr. Macrae.

‘Come down, all of you,’ he said.  ‘The wireless telegraphy is at work.’

He waited till they were all in the smoking-room, and feverishly examined the tape.

‘Escape of De Wet,’ he read.  ’Disasters to the Imperial Yeomanry.  Strike of Cigarette Makers.  Great Fire at Hackney.’

‘There!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.  ’We might have gone to bed in London, and not known all that till we got the morning papers to-morrow.  And here we are fifty miles from a railway station or a telegraph office—­no, we’re nearer Inchnadampf.’

’Would that I were in the Isle of Apples, Mell Moy, far, far from civilisation!’ said Blake.

“There shall be no grief there or sorrow,” so sings the minstrel of The Wooing of Etain.

“Fresh flesh of swine, banquets of new milk and ale shalt thou have with me then, fair lady,” Merton read out from the book he had been speaking of to the Budes.