When he went down into the dining-room, before
going out to the Tower, she would have a nice
tea waiting for him. But there was a smear of disgust
across his thought. . . The dusk was beginning to
creep into the room. Across the wide roof of old



THE PAGAN 123

Dublin the shadows were stealing, and far away towards
the Coombe he could hear a barrel-organ playing.
"What d'ye be doing now?"

These words from his mother's letter were burning into
his brain. This was what he was doing while there
was sorrow in his mother's house and the harvest still
in the fields. . . There was a sickness of heart upon
him as he took his tea. Margaret moved about him
in attendance. ..
He was blind to the beauty of the evening scenes
as he went on through the streets. Passing "The Daffo-
dils" he thought of taking a drink, but his disgust merely
swelled higher with the thought. The decadents would
all be in here, the wasters talking of books they had
never written nor never would write. . . At the stage
door of the Tower he was oppressed by the thought
that Ellen O'Connor would be waiting in the wings to
speak to him with a quiet look of trust in her eyes. ..
A few minutes later, as he stood before the mirror in
his dressing-room he was saddened by the thought that he
was supremely unworthy of her. He was chilled into a
bronze stillness of despair as he stood there gazing into
the mirror. . . The other actor in the room was quoting
passages from The Hound of Heaven to himself. ..
