the nursery ballad of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!"
Susy Whincop seized him by the wrist.
"So the Fat Boy has escaped the massacre? Come and make us laugh. We are getting too serious at the piano end of the room."
"Lady," said Fortune, "tempt me not to mirth-making. My irony is terrible when roused."
As he went to the piano I caught sight of Brand just making his way through a group by the door.
I had never seen him in civil clothes, but he looked as I had imagined him, in an old pre-war dinner-jacket and baggy trousers, and a shirt that bulged abominably. A tuft of hair stuck up behind—the tuft that Eileen O'Connor had pulled for Auld Lang Syne. But he looked fine and distinguished, with his hard, lean face, and strong jaw, and melancholy eyes.
He caught sight of me and gripped my hand, painfully.
"Hullo, old man! Welcome back. I have heaps to tell you."
"Good things?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"Not good. . . . Damned bad, alas!"
He did not continue the conversation. He stared across my shoulder at the door as though he saw an apparition. I turned to see the object of his gaze. It was Eileen O'Connor, whom I had first met in Lille.
She was in an evening frock cut low at the neck, and her arms were bare. There was a smile in her dark Irish eyes, and about her long, humourous mouth. The girl I had seen in Lille was not so elegant as this, not so pretty. The lifting of care perhaps had made the change.
