feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure passion of her Irish
blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one ever
striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the spindrift
of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far western
coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare outpoured on
some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is but a weak
thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must have suffered in
moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question of active dread, was
to her son almost too cruel to contemplate, although it explained and
justified much.

In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home
on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were
alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular intervals,
hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg. Then followed
silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a former associate,
one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired, hysteric creature,
inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal machines and wholesale
slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a gentle doglike devotion to
Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would arrive depressed and shadowy in
the shadowy twilights. But, once in the presence of the beings whom he
loved, he became effervescent. His belief was unlimited in the Head
Centre, the Chief, in his demonic power and fertility of resource. That
any evil should befall him!--Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with
the inalienable optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state
hopeful conjecture as established fact, thereby doing homage to the
spirit of delusion which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost
thought. But a spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a
little too shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender-
hearted subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible