efer since she vas ten years olt it has been de same.” And she was overwhelmingly conscious of that immeasurable mountain of a man, Mike Fogarty, beside her, the sweet clarity of his blue eyes and the almost purring music of his voice as he gently laid his mutton of a hand upon her shoulder for a moment, saying:
“Ah, Miss Helen, I don’t know how Will could have got along all these years without ye—for he has said the same himself a thousand times—aye! that he has!”
And instantly, having heard these words, and feeling the strong calm presences of these powerful men around her, it seemed to Helen she had somehow re-entered a magic world that she thought was gone for ever. And she was immensely content.
At the same moment, with a sense of wonder, she discovered an astonishing thing, that she had never noticed before, but that she must have heard a thousand times;—this was that of all these people, who knew Gant best, and had a deep and true affection for him, there were only two—Mr. Fogarty and Mr. Ramsay—who had ever addressed him by his first name. And so far as she could now remember, these two men, together with Gant’s mother, his brothers, his sister Augusta, and a few of the others who had known him in his boyhood in Pennsylvania, were the only people who ever had. And this revelation cast a strange, a lonely and a troubling light upon the great gaunt figure of the stone-cutter, which moved her powerfully and which she had never felt before. And most strange of all was the variety of names by which these various people called her father.
As for Eliza, had any of her children ever heard her address her husband as anything but “Mr. Gant”—had she ever called him by one of his first names—their anguish of shame and impropriety would have been so great that they could hardly have endured it. But such a lapse would have been incredible: Eliza could no more have addressed Gant by his first name than she could have quoted Homer’s Greek; had she tried to address him so, the muscles of her tongue would have found it physically impossible to pronounce the word. And in this fact there was somehow, now that Gant was dying, an enormous pathos. It gave to Eliza’s life with him a pitiable and moving dignity, the compensation of a proud and wounded spirit for all the insults and injuries that had been heaped upon it. She had been a young countrywoman of twenty-four when she had met him; she had been ignorant of life and innocent of the cruelty, the violence, the drunkenness and abuse of which men are
