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The Strange Attraction

ond cup of coffee. There were a few stragglers scattered at the tables, men who had lived not wisely but too well in the recent past and looked as if they were doubtful about the blessing of surviving to greet another day.

The priest rose and drew out her chair. Father Ryan was small and thin and exquisite. His hair was like white floss silk, and his bright blue eyes were both keen and mild. He looked at Valerie as the other men had done with obvious admiration, but the quality of his approval was a very different thing.

“I hope the heat did not keep you from sleep,” he said, after they had greeted each other.

“It did not, thanks. I slept much too well. I meant to be down at eight. But that’s not the first good intention of mine that has gone wrong.”

She was pleased to see that he gave her a quick smile.

As she ate her eggs and bacon she asked him questions about his parish. She was glad to think she would have his voice to listen to, for he spoke the most beautiful English in the world, the English of the Irish scholar. He sat with her till she had finished, and bowed her through the door with a manner that made her feel as if she were in a mediæval tale.

She could see little of the town as she walked to the office. She had no idea of the extent of it as it straggled along the river with its broad streets and many open lots. It was almost entirely a one-story town, the largest on the Wairoa, and the only one to have banks and now a paper of its own. It was the terminus of a railway that ran eighteen miles north into one of the finest kauri forests of the country. But nobody knew just why it had happened to grow where it did, for it was on the narrowest part of a great barren tongue of land that stretched from the Kaipara heads for the best part of sixty miles between the