"Does your memory recall one of that type?" persisted the priest.
"No, it does not."
"Mine does," said Father Murray. "I once had occasion to offer a prayer at an important banquet at which that gentleman was the guest of honor. He sat near me, and when I asked him where he had acquired such a mastery of English, he told me that he had been for five years minister at the Court of St. James. He is now accredited to Washington. Do you see why I suggest that Sihasset is greatly honored to-day?"
Mark could not conceal his astonishment.
"But why under heaven," he said, "should a foreign diplomat be mixed up in a camp of Slavic laborers?"
"There are strange things in diplomacy," said Father Murray. "And stranger things in Sihasset when the town constable has so much interest in your taking of tea at Killimaga. If you had turned around a moment ago, you would have seen our constable's coattails disappearing behind the bushes on our right."
CHAPTER V
WITH EMPTY HANDS
In the long after years Mark Griffin used to wonder at the strange way in which love for Ruth Atheson entered his life. Mark always owned that, somehow, this love seemed sent for his salvation. It filled his life, but only as the air fills a vacuum; so it was, consequently, nothing that prevented other interests from living with it. It aroused him to greater ambition. The long-neglected creative power moved without Mark's knowing why. His pen wrote down his thoughts, and he no longer destroyed what he committed to paper. It now seemed a crime to destroy what had cost him only a pleasure to produce. The world had suddenly become beautiful. No longer did Japan and Siberia call to him. He had no new plans, but he knew that they were forming, slowly, but with finality and authority.