was lying with that rapt smile on his face which she was so afraid of.
She told him she was afraid and she wished he would not say such things;
and that made him laugh, and he put his arms round her, and laughed and
laughed, and said it was only a kind of swearing, and she must cheer up.
He let her give him some trional to make him sleep, and then she went off
to her bed again. But when they both woke late, she heard him, as he
dressed, repeating fragments of verse, quoting quite without order, as
the poem drifted through his memory. He told her at breakfast that it was
a poem which Longfellow had written to Lowell upon the occasion of his
wife's death, and he wanted to get it and read it to her. She said she
did not see how he could let his mind run on such gloomy things. But he
protested he was not the least gloomy, and that he supposed his
recollection of the poem was a continuation of his thinking about the
Angel of the Lord.

"While they were at table a tramp came up the drive under the window, and
looked in at them hungrily. He was a very offensive tramp, and quite took
Mrs. Ormond's appetite away: but Ormond would not send him round to the
kitchen, as she wanted; he insisted upon taking him a plate and a cup of
coffee out on the veranda himself. When she expostulated with him, he
answered fantastically that the fellow might be an angel of the Lord, and
he asked her if she remembered Parnell's poem of 'The Hermit.' Of course
she didn't, but he needn't get it, for she didn't want to hear it, and if
he kept making her so nervous, she should be sick herself. He insisted
upon telling her what the poem was, and how the angel in it had made
himself abhorrent to the hermit by throttling the babe of the good man
who had housed and fed them, and committing other atrocities, till the
hermit couldn't stand it any longer, and the angel explained that he had
done it all to prevent the greater harm that would have come if he had
not killed and stolen in season. Ormond laughed at her disgust, and said