I flung away a half-smoked cigar and lighted my pipe. There was no disguising the truth that the coming of the Holbrooks had got on my nerves--at least that was my phrase for it. Now that I thought of it, they were impudent intruders and Paul Stoddard had gone too far in turning them over to me. There was nothing in their story, anyhow; it was preposterous, and I resolved to let them severely alone. But even as these thoughts ran through my mind I turned toward St. Agatha's, whose lights were visible through the trees, and I knew that there was nothing honest in my impatience. Helen Holbrook's eyes were upon me and her voice called from the dark; and when the clock chimed nine in the tower beyond the wall memory brought back the graceful turn of her dark head, the firm curve of her throat as she had listened to the mellow fling of the bells.
And here, for the better instruction of those friends who amuse themselves with the idea that I am unusually susceptible, as they say, to the charms of woman, I beg my reader's indulgence while I state, quite honestly, the flimsy basis of this charge. Once, in my twentieth year, while I was still an undergraduate at Trinity, Dublin, I went to the Killarney Lakes for a week's end. My host--a fellow student--had taken me home to see his horses; but it was not his stable, but his blue-eyed sister, that captivated my fancy. I had not known that anything could be so beautiful as she was, and I feel and shall always feel that it was greatly to my credit that I fell madly in love with her. Our affair was fast and furious, and lamentably detrimental to my standing at Trinity. I wrote some pretty bad verses in her praise, and I am not in the least ashamed of that weakness, or that the best florist in Ireland prospered at the expense of my tailor and laundress. It lasted a year, and to say that it was like a beautiful dream is merely to betray my poor command of language. The end, too, was fitting enough, and not without its compensations: I kissed her one night--she will not, I am sure, begrudge me the confession; it was a moonlight night in May; and thereafter within two months she married a Belfast brewer's son who could not have rhymed eyes with skies to save his malted soul.