three or four in the morning. Father lost all the ready money in the house, and nearly emptied the stables."

Milbanke stood before her horrified and absorbed. An understanding of many things, before obscure, had come to him while she was speaking; and with the knowledge, a sudden deep pity for this child of his old friend—a sudden sense of guilt at his own blindness, his own weakness.

"Miss Clodagh," he said quickly, in his stiff, formal voice. Then he paused, as she raised her hand with a sharp gesture of attention.

A heavy step sounded on the gravel outside the house. There was an instant's hesitation; then Clodagh leant forward with swift presence of mind and blew out the three remaining candles.

"You understand now?" she whispered.

"Yes," he murmured, below his breath. "Yes; I understand."

A moment later he heard her flit down the corridor, and heard Asshlin open the heavy outer door.

CHAPTER V

Thus it was that James Milbanke entered on his first night at Orristown. The surprise, the excitement, and the culminating incident of the evening would have been disturbing to a man of even more placid temperament; and rebel as he might against the weakness, he lay awake considerably longer than was his wont in the uncomfortable, canopied bed, listening to the numberless infinitesimal sounds that break the silence of a sleeping house—from the faint, occasional cracking of the furniture to the scurrying of a mouse behind the plaster of the walls. Then gradually, as his ears became accustomed to these minor noises, another sound, unnoticed in the activity of the earlier hours, obtruded itself softly but persistently upon his consciousness—the subdued and regular breaking of the sea on the rocks below the house.

A slight sense of annoyance was his first feeling, for it was many years since he had slept by the sea; then quietly, lingeringly, soothingly the rhythmical persistence of the sound began to tell. Imperceptibly the confusing ideas of the evening became pleasantly indistinct—the numberless contradictory feelings blurred into one delightful sensation of indifference and repose. With the salt, moist air, borne to him through the open window, and the great untiring lullaby of the ocean rising and falling upon his senses, like the purring of a gigantic cat, he fell asleep.

His first sensation upon waking the next morning was one of pleasure—the placid, unquestioning satisfaction that comes to the untroubled mind with the advent of a fine day. To his simple taste, the sights and sounds that met his waking consciousness were possessed of an unaccustomed charm. With daylight, the room that last night had held grim and even ghostly suggestions, took on a more human and more friendly air. The ancient mahogany furniture seemed anxious to reflect the morning sunshine; the massive posts of the bed with their drapery of faded repp no longer glowered upon the intruder. Each object was bathed in, and rejuvenated by, the golden warmth, the incomparable mellow radiance of sea and sky that flowed in at the open window.

For a while he lay in contemplative enjoyment of this early, untainted atmosphere, while the sounds of the awakening day gradually rose above the soft beating of the outgoing tide—falling upon his ears in a pleasant, primitive medley of clacking fowls, joyous, yelping dogs, and stamping horses. For a space he lay still; then the inevitable wish to take active part in this world created from the darkness and the silence of the night aroused him; and, slipping out of bed, he drew on a dressing-gown and walked to the window.

The sight that met his eyes was one of infinite beauty. The delicacy—the poetry—the subtle, unnameable charm that lie in the hollow of Nature's hand were over land and sky and sea; the warmth and wealth of summer stretched before him, but summer mellowed and softened by a golden autumnal haze.

There are more inspiring countries than Ireland—countries more richly dowered in vegetation; countries more radiant in atmosphere and brilliant in colouring: but there is no land where the Hand of the Maker is more poignantly felt; where the mystic spirit of creation—the wonderful, tender, pathetic sense of the Beginning—has been so strangely preserved. As Milbanke stood at the open window, his eyes travelled without interruption over the wide green fields—neither lawn nor meadow—that spread from the house to the shore, owning no boundary wall beyond the low, shelving rocks of red sandstone that rose a natural barrier against the encroachments of the tide. And from the fields his gaze wandered onward, drawn irresistibly and inevitably to the sea itself—the watchful, tyrannical guardian of the silent land.

It lay before him like a tremendous glassy lake, stretching in one untroubled sweep from Orristown to the point, three miles away, where the purple headland of Carrigmore completed the semicircle of the bay. The silence, the majesty of that sweep of water was indescribable. From the rim of yellow sand, which the indolent waves were lapping, to the misted horizon, not one sign of human life marred the smoothness of its surface. Across the bay at Carrigmore a few spirals of smoke rose from the cluster of pink and white cottages lying under the shadow of the Round Tower; on the long, sandy strand a couple of bare-legged boys were leisurely raking up the sea-weed that the waves had left, and slowly piling it on a waiting donkey butt; but the sea itself was undisturbed. It lay as it might have lain on the first day of completed creation—mystical, sublime, untouched.

Milbanke was no poet, yet the scene impressed him. The extraordinary sense of an inimitable and impenetrable peace before which man and man's mere transitory concerns are dwarfed, if not entirely eliminated, touched him vaguely. It was with a tinge of something bordering upon reluctance that he at last drew his eyes from the picture and began to dress.

But once freed from the spell of the ocean, his mind reverted to the other interests that lay closer at hand. He found himself wondering how his entertainers would appear on a second inspection; whether, like his room, they would take on a more commonplace semblance with the advent of daylight. The touch of irrepressible and human curiosity that the speculation aroused gave a spur to the business of dressing; and it was well under the twenty minutes usually devoted to his neat and careful toilet when he found himself crossing the corridor and descending the stairs.

He encountered no one as he passed through the hall; and catching a fresh suggestion of sunshine through the door that stood hospitably open, he paused for an instant to take a cursory glance at the gravelled sweep that terminated the drive, and the grassy slope surmounted by a fringe of beeches that formed the outlook from the front of the house. Then he turned quickly, and, recrossing the hall, passed into the dining-room.

None of the household had yet appeared, but here also the daylight had worked changes.

The curtains were drawn back, permitting the view of fields and sea, that he had already studied from his bedroom, to break uninterruptedly through the three lofty windows. The effect was one of extreme airiness and light; and it was quite a minute before his gaze turned to the darker side of the room, where the portrait of the famous Anthony Asshlin hung above the fire.

Realising that he was alone in the big room, he crossed to the table where breakfast was already laid—the remains of the enormous ham rising from an untidy paper frill to defy the attacks of the largest appetite. In the brilliance of the light, the fineness of the table linen and its state of dilapidation were both accentuated, as was the genuine beauty and intrinsic value of the badly kept silver.

But Milbanke had no time to absorb these details, for instantly he reached the table his eye was caught by a folded slip of paper lying by his place. With a touch of surprise he stooped forward and picked it