Produced by Al Haines.

                          _*The Scratch Pack*_

                        _*By Dorothea Conyers.*_

                               _Author of
                "The Strayings of Sandy," "Meave," etc._

                       _LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO.
                            PATERNOSTER ROW
                                 1916_

                           *THE SCRATCH PACK*

                              *CHAPTER I*

"If there even appeared to be the faintest reason for his not going into
something," said Gheena severely. Then she put her hand on the collar of
the nondescript cur named Crabbit, an animal which was not precisely an
Irish terrier and not quite a retriever, had some distant connections in
the house of spaniels, and other relations too varied to trace, the
result of this liberally scattered ancestry being endowed with a
silky-red coat, and liquid, truthful eyes which expressed his powers of
affection, but not the original sin behind his broad forehead.

"You will get a cold in your nose and snuffle at dinner if you go into
the water again, Crabbit.  No, sir!  If there could be the faintest
reason for it," went on Gheena Freyne.  "If he was like Dick Kennedy,
who has no one to help him, or half blind like Professor Brown, or
couldn’t walk——"  She stopped, flushing, and took up her knitting.

"Like me—yes, Gheena."  The words came lightly, but a little half
stifled twisted sigh slipped from Darby Dillon’s lips.  Darby had been a
light-hearted, long-limbed soldier in days of peace.  If you saw him
sitting down or in the saddle, and came up at his right side, he was
apparently long limbed and good-looking still: a lean well-built man of
about thirty-five, but at the left side Darby’s shoulder stooped; he
shuffled with one limb stiff and useless, generally with a crutch under
his shoulder.

A crashing fall playing polo on hard Egyptian ground had left him maimed
and crippled.

"I—did....  I wasn’t.  He’s gone again," said Gheena philosophically.

A streak of red had tumbled over the brow of the low cliff, and a
resounding splash marked the fact that Crabbit was once more in hot
pursuit of seagulls, the hope to seize one unawares being embedded
deeply in him.

"He is off to that rock where they all sit on.  Mother gets quite
worried when he snuffles under her chair and thinks it is bits or
perhaps he is going mad.  Why do some people"—Gheena whistled
impotently—"never get a grip of life, Darby?  Mummie can’t ever think
about Crabbit without asking Dearest if it isn’t right—Aren’t the dog’s
nose noises suspicious?  Darby—I—I never meant to refer to anyone."

Darby said cheerily that he knew it, and that one got used to a lost
leg, even if it meant other losses—here his eyes clouded—and that a
fellow who could sit on a saddle need never grumble.

They sat silent then, looking across the sea; the great endless water
carpet was grey under a grey sky, always moving with froth of spray on
its lips when it touched the shore, here and there a line of white
breaking over some hidden rock, its steely heaving distance merging to
the moving sky.  Far off the smudge of smoke marked the track of a liner
standing out, and two fishing boats, red-sailed, were creeping into
harbour.  The sea-birds cried their curiously eerie notes, a little
stretch of golden sand sandwiched between the rocks was fringed with
pipers skimming on their infinitesimal legs, and here and there a
breathless and outraged gull eyeing Crabbit irritably.

The peace of late autumn was on the world; smoke curled up lazily from
the little stone chimneys; children were gathering seaweed and carrying
it up to dry.  Red war seemed impossible as the two looked out across
the heaving, dimpling sea.

The cliffs, covered with short, sweet grass, ran at Duncahir to the V of
a small deep harbour, shaded by high hills at the back, shadowing it
chilly.  Beyond the shadow of the hills stretched a tangle of jutting
rocks hollowed by innumerable caves, out to where the Atlantic beat and
surged on the higher cliffs outside, and, skipping, trod its brave way
to and fro to distant ports.

The mouth of the inlet was wide, and generally rough with the swell and
rush of cross currents.

In the soft salty air fuchsias flourished, their blazing bells in every
sheltered nook, and planted in hedges for shelter.

In a hollow near the mouth of the harbour, battered trees protesting
against their position as mere protection from roaring gales, Castle
Freyne stood, tall and rambling, with all kinds of semi-tropical flowers
growing in the garden, and its rows of blind windows staring
reproachfully among open-eyed glassed fellows.

The village of Duncahir hung upon the very edge of the cliffs with an
air of supreme pride because it did not topple over, so close were the
houses built to where the land broke off and the sudden rent all
fuchsia-edged.

The Freynes had once owned all the mountain and bog and flat lands along
the east side of the harbour, and had now disposed of it with cheer;
this sentiment lessened when it appeared that the tenants of the estate
still expected to have defunct calves replaced, help given with carts
and horses and all the old benefits which a patient landlady had
conferred on them.

Matilda Freyne, Gheena’s mother, had acquiesced with every decision made
for her in life save one—her own name.  She had detested it in her
childhood, turned it to Matty and Mat and Tilda during her girlhood, and
then dared anyone worthy of the name of friend to call her by any of
these abbreviations, as they were worse than the original.

She had seriously thought of becoming Genevieve when confirmed, but
having some vague idea that a change of name was irrefutably coupled
with immersion, and her hair being straight by nature, she refrained,
holding a grievance for years afterwards against the clergyman because
he had not fully explained a subject which she here consulted him.

On her wedding day the "I Matilda" was spoken so faintly that an
agitated mother held out strong smelling-salts and quite upset the
ceremony.  It took the Bishop, a nervous man, five minutes to recover,
because he had been bending over to whisper reassurance to the
faint-voiced bride at the moment.

In the vestry Matilda viciously upset the ink-bottle over the registry
book, thus obliterating every signature except her own.

When her first child was born and proved to be a girl, Mrs. Freyne
decided that at least she should not be burdened with one hideous name.
Her child’s was to be Irish and the name of a flower.  Very weak-minded
people have occasional outbursts of complete obstinacy, and when Major
Freyne, who was very deaf, insisted on the family name of Annette or
Caroline, Matilda, his wife, merely sent for the gardener and asked for
information about Irish flowers.

When Hallinan scratched his head and seemed to think of nothing but Push
och Bui and Cruve tharrig, Mrs. Freyne was still determined, but
undecided.  She held the baby herself at the font, had a flash of
inspiration five minutes beforehand, and pronounced its name
firmly—Carrigeen.

It was sufficiently like Caroline to escape her husband’s notice, and
when the astounded Mr. Hallinan, who was too well acquainted with the
word, said "Eh, what?"  Matilda Freyne repeated it hurriedly and firmly.

When it was pointed out to her—and, in fact, she remembered that
Carrigeen was a certain edible seaweed—Mrs. Freyne said gloomily that at
least it was not Matilda, and bent before the blast of marital wrath,
with what Major Freyne called heatedly the aggravation of a sally bough.

When Carrigeen could no longer be Baby or Doatie she certainly could not
be Carrig or Een, and it was the nurse who settled the matter by calling
her Miss Gheena, with an "h" introduced.

Major Freyne was taken early to his fathers, and his wife being quite
unable to decide anything for herself, drifted into matrimony with a
somewhat peppery cousin, who resented Gheena’s ultimate inheritance of
Castle Freyne at her marriage and the prospect of the dower house,
Girtnamurragh, for himself.

Gheena was slight, with very bright brown hair, seldom burdened with a
hat; a skin browned to a very soft tan, grey-blue eyes, a crooked smile
and a determined will.

"Crabbit very nearly got a gull, Darby; he is snapping at jelly-fish now
and coming in.  And why you men don’t say something!"

Darby Dillon observed patiently that if an American citizen chose to
come to Duncahir for his health, they really had no right to criticize.

Gheena returned severely that she did not believe that Basil Stafford
had any right either to America or ill-health, and got up.

The sun was setting, and through a rift in the pack of clouds came bars
of amber and gold, turning Innisfail island to a dome of misty purple,
and Leeshane to a low hump of mauve.

"If Mom did not cry and talk of her heart I’d go out myself," said
Gheena, dropping three stitches in her excitement, her needles clicking
and flashing feverishly.

"And if I went, no one here would knit.  I caught that hateful Maria
Casey doing fancy work yesterday, and Annette Freyne making a mitten
which might do for a sandbag.  There is even no hope of hunting.  Hill
has gone now.  I tell you, Darby, I believe—I really believe that
he’s—that Stafford man—a——"

"It was hot enough to take a swim this morning," said Basil Stafford
easily.  "You might have come out, Miss Freyne, when I was doing aquatic
feats."

Gheena knitted faster still.  She looked up, frowning, at a nondescript
and active young man, with pleasant eyes and a somewhat grim mouth, who
was standing close to them.

"Coming like—like—a man in rubber shoes!  You might be out after spies,"
said Gheena sarcastically.

"It was after Carrigeen at low tide," said the young man gravely,
showing a basket of white seaweed, to prove that the remark was not
personal.  "The news is none too cheery," he added gravely, looking down
at a telegraph-form.

Gheena pulled at the flimsy slip, to read something concerning cows,
sheep, pigs and several numbers, and to grunt suspiciously.

"The newspaper office sends them to me in code," said Basil softly.  "I
get so much more for my money that way."  He translated a long message,
and Gheena’s lips drooped until her eyes grew angry.

With the energy and skill of the amateur strategist, she immediately
explained how completely everything had been muddled.

"How, if the English had done one thing and another and France and
Russia the rest, the whole of the German army would be scrambling away
back to Berlin to get into the Kaiser’s coal cellars."

"Just rush and dash," declaimed Gheena loftily, "not this retreating and
losing."

Basil Stafford remarked, "And perhaps of men," rather slyly; to which
Gheena answered, "Yes," with a glance of fiery meaning, and he
grinned—softly.

Picking up the khaki sock—Gheena often dropped it—Basil inquired gravely
whether the holes were for the easily clipping in of suspenders, and
really wilted this time before the look which flashed over the piece of
knitting.

"There is quite a party here to-night," said Dillon, looking along the
cliff.  "Here is Mrs. Weston now."

Gheena, staring unhappily, suddenly remembered that she had promised to
go to Mrs. Weston’s and fetch her up to tea and: "It was all Crabbit’s
fault," said Gheena placidly.  "I don’t know why people are staying on
here this year like this.  Mrs. Weston hasn’t even the excuse of
drainage works."

Mrs. Weston, who was slim and upright and nice-looking, came tripping
in, heels palpably too high, along the cliffs. She was quite ostensibly
but neatly painted, and made no pretence as to the expense of her
chestnut wig.  She was a capable young woman, who now talked of taking a
house at Duncahir because her people in Australia had joined the army
and she was quite alone.

The district inspector, a stout and self-opinionated youth, had shown
marked symptoms of admiration, these coupled with discreet desire to
know if she was one of those widows whose husbands left provisos in
their wills.

Mr. Keefe joined the group at the moment.  He was also asked to tea, and
Darby nodded.

Violet Weston held out an eager hand for the telegram and clamoured for
news.  Personally, she was one of the optimists who regarded the retreat
as mere strategy to lure the Germans on, and who considered that the war
would end in Berlin with the Kaiser on exhibition in a neat brass cage.

Stafford read the message aloud, keeping it himself.

"You see, you wouldn’t understand it," said Gheena, eyeing her knitting.
"He has them sent to him in some code or other."

Stafford tore up the wire into very small pieces and coloured faintly.

Mrs. Weston, walking on, was as fine as an optimist as Gheena had been
as a strategist.

She reviewed the revealed facts of the Germans having been found
starving, their foolish mistakes, and of that dreadful man, the Kaiser.

"The scald to him and his likes," said a voice bitterly.

The old kennel huntsman, Barty, limped out from behind a hedge of
crimson fuchsias, his face set dolorously.

"The scald to all Kaysers," said Barty, "with Mrs. Day down to say, an’
thruth in it, that seven geese were whipt lasht night, and that ould
Larry Hassit, that was never too dacent, swearin’ he’ll pisin if the
foxes isn’t kilt.  If there’s no huntin’ now there’ll never be huntin’
again, Misther Darby," said Barty lugubriously.  "I declare to God the
poor craythers of hounds an’ I out, do be throwin’ an eye across the
finces an’ then an eye up to me, an’ they are but axin’ the question
aloud why they wouldn’t be let off to hunt.  Signs bye, the nice run I
had afther two of the puppies last Thursday, and what harm but it was a
hare an’ I lambastin’ them, Sammy must let the resht out of hand, and
where did they make but up into Grange Gorse just across the road and
frightened Mrs. Harby’s bawn of cows hither an’ over, an’ she milkin’
them at the time."

Gheena dropped her knitting, and wished to know if someone could not
hunt the hounds.  "Why not, Darby? And——"  She could whip in, they might
try.

Harold Keefe thought that if he was not too busy, that a joint
mastership might be possible—say, Freyne and Dillon and himself; he
looked important.

Darby leant over to Barty, because he knew the old man always had a
hunting-horn in his pocket.  This he extracted and handed politely to
Keefe, with a wintry smile.

Mr. Keefe’s cheeks assumed the proportions of cherubs as he endeavoured
to wrest sound from the piece of fashioned metal.  Having produced a
faint squeak, he said irritably that of course anyone could learn to
blow on the thing; and, anyhow, they might have whistles, as more
respectful to the absent master’s memory.

"God save ye—whistles!"  Barty blew a clear shrill hoot on the horn—the
quick toot of the "gone away"—and it set Gheena’s pulses dancing, and
brought a flush to Darby’s cheeks as he limped along, holding his crutch
deftly beneath his half useless arm.

"Forrard away!  Away!" the shrill screech echoed out across the sea.

"But supposing—oh, the sock!  thank you, Mr. Stafford—that we got leave
to keep a bobbing back—if it is bobbery, it’s just the same, Darby—and
rout out the coverts and kill foxes.  Now both the Slatterys have
enlisted, so Michael Maher told me he would not run his ’baygles’ this
year, and there are lots of them."

Darby broke in to say thoughtfully that there were, and lots of
varieties among them also.

"You could gather them up and keep them at Dillonsview, Barty, in the
old yard, and everyone would love to come out, if Captain Lindlay would
give us leave.  He might even lend us Patience and Pollen to keep."

Barty murmured "God help us!—lend ye!" impolitely.

It is at all times difficult to discuss anything when one stands up.
There was a large rock jutting out of the short grass, and the three men
sat down upon it, because the idea was worth thinking of.

Darby waved his crutch, Keefe and Barty chattered. The absent might be
glad to have his wild country hunted over in some form.  Subscriptions
would roll in, everyone wanted to hunt—and it was really quite possible
now that the war might last for the winter months.

"A bit of a note to the Captain," said Barty.

"It’s quite absurd, but it might be done," said Darby.

"And you agree as to joint mastership and the whistles," said Harold
Keefe.

"And I’ll whip in," said Gheena, "as we could not get a temporary master
and the huntsman left unexpectedly, and Lindlay is shy about a strange
man."

"But—you don’t really think they won’t be completely beaten before the
winter is over," chipped in Violet Weston.  "Is it really worth while?
They can’t prosper, those dreadful treaty-breakers, can they?  But, of
course, hunting would be nice."

Mr. Keefe said that he knew of a horse, one the Government hadn’t
snapped, and to be bought for the value—if Mrs. Weston was for the
chase.

That neat-looking lady said she was, indeed; but in Kleeawuvia there
were no side saddles, and would people here object to her riding like a
man?

Mr. Keefe replied that Lady Rosie O’Brien rode astride, and that ought
to be enough for anyone.  Here he tried to get up, to find himself
enveloped in the grey warp and woof of Gheena’s sock, a portion of the
wool having unwittingly got round Darby’s crutch, so that at every wave
he had unwrought much labour.

Gheena, winding wrathfully, declared that if she had not just got on
nicely in the plain part she would not have minded; but to re-do half a
sock—here she hauled a loop tight about Mr. Keefe’s plump neck, and made
him gurgle voiceless wonder at the strength of wool.

When his pink flush had deepened to vermilion, he broke the strangling
strand and gulped reproach at the unsympathetic but annoyed Gheena.

They had decided they would be too late for tea, and were walking on
again, when with a hurricane of little squeaks Mrs. Weston discovered
that she had dropped a topaz and diamond brooch of some value.

One which dear Francis had given to her, and the clasp had always been
fairly good.  The prospect of her tea faded as she looked across to
where they had been sitting.

Basil Stafford felt the sad right at his youth when he offered to go
back and look for the jewel.

"No.  If Mr. Keefe will come, I know his eyes would find anything."  A
flashing glance almost dispelled the sinking desire for tea and plum
cake which Mr. Keefe felt acutely.

"We won’t be long," said Violet Weston, scuttling away on her high
heels.

Mr. Keefe left with her and returned for a box of matches.

"I’ll catch her easy," he said, with a blend of gloom and complacency in
his voice.  "The fine mover she’d be if it wasn’t for those silly shoes
she puts on because her feet are a bit out-size."

"All that planning for that fellow," observed Darby, looking after the
hurrying pair.

                              *CHAPTER II*

It was considerably past five when Gheena Freyne coo-eed loudly towards
the drawing-room window and followed the Australian call with a shriek
for tea. Mrs. Freyne, promptly appearing on the door-step, observed
placidly that she had not waited, and didn’t they all think she was
right?

Matilda Freyne was stoutly comely, possessed with a mild attractiveness
which would never leave her.  A quantity of shining red-gold hair, which
declined to get grey, was puffed in old-fashioned style above her placid
forehead.  She had mild blue eyes and a charming voice.

"One never knows when Gheena goes to the sea what she may get into,"
continued Gheena’s mother, holding out a plump hand.  "Now wasn’t I
right, Darby, not to wait?"

When Darby said "You were, Matilda," the word brought a look of dislike
which forty-six years of possession had not toned down.

"But they will boil a new kettle, and the hot cakes may not be quite
cold," said their hostess cheerfully. "Even if they are, as they were,
rather underdone, it will not much matter.  And where is Mrs. Weston?"

Darby observed that the widow lady had gone looking for a topaz with Mr.
Keefe and would be back presently. Mrs. Freyne, with a placid and
unmoving finger on the bell, said she thought that was quite useless,
because Dearest George had told her long ago that there were none on the
Duncahir beaches.  The only thing she had ever got there was that
disappointing stone with the imitation silver in it; so perhaps they had
better send the pantry boy to tell the others to come.

Basil Stafford stood at the window looking out.  The trees had been cut
away in front of the house to show a glimpse of the sea and the opposite
cliffs.

Fuchsia hedges sheltered the empty flower-beds from the blast, and
beyond the other fuchsia hedges sheltered the two smooth green tennis
courts, where watchful Gheena pounced on every weed.

It was all still and peaceful in the falling autumn dusk, the golden
light of the dipping sun still flashing below the curtain of clouds, a
boat stealing home to harbour.

The hot cakes proved to have lost even warmth, but to have preserved
their memory of their too early exit from the oven.  Yet three young
people ate them with fearless risk of indigestion.

Several very large cakes of heavy calibre stood on the wide tea-table.
Mrs. Freyne had not as yet commenced the small economies of war time and
given up raisins, cherries and icing.

The discussion concerning the possibility of the scratch pack of hounds
rose and fell over the tea-table, spurred on by comments from old Barty,
who was taking his tea just outside the front windows, nibbling cherry
cake and enumerating the danger of not killing foxes.

"What I want to know is how many of them we are likely to kill," said
Darby thoughtfully, "with those old harriers and our amateur hunting?"

Barty said: "What harrum so long as they’d see ye makin’ endeavours?"
And added, after a pause: "An’ in spite of ye, Misther Darby, they might
get away and pull down a sad one that wouldn’t be too crabbit, or that
was full of hins.  Ye’d never know."

Darby coughed thoughtfully.

Mrs. Freyne, who still hunted, and went wherever her pilots led her,
enjoying each hunt completely without a thought of what hounds were
doing, was enthusiastic. She disliked riding without an object, and her
dresses appeared to be shrinking.

"Of course, if Dearest George thought——"

Gheena saw Mrs. Weston’s blue sailor hat in the distance, pointed to it,
and asked where Dearest had got to.

Gheena had been a completely self-willed girl of eight when her mother
had married again, and would probably have called him Papa or Daddy
without thought, if her mother had not consulted her anxiously as to her
convictions on second-hand fathers.

Once the idea of wronging the kindly deaf man, who had called her his
Baby Seaweed, was placed in her head, Gheena started round her
stepfather with suspiciously resentful eyes, and called him nothing
until her mother’s "Dearest George" made her mutinously say Dearest
also, naughtily, feeling resentful surprise because it was accepted as a
charming idea.

"We got it," said Keefe, mopping his pink forehead, "but I tell you we
had to look."

Basil Stafford asked where with a faint grin.

"On the edge of the cliff," said Keefe.  "I’ll take it stewed or roast,
Mrs. Freyne, so long as it’s wet.  Where Mrs. Weston tried herself
twice; but she sent me down the third time."

"And Mr. Keefe’s sharp eyes saw it shining," said Mrs. Weston happily,
patting a small ornament in her blouse. "I knew he could help if anyone
could.  If it’s absolutely no trouble, Mrs. Freyne, I am afraid of very
strong tea; it’s nervy.  And we walked so fast!  Mr. Keefe flies. I’m
tired."

"And I after her all the——" began Keefe blankly, and then stopped to
drink....  Why put aside admiration even if undeserved.

At this point a motor came to the door and George Freyne bustled in.

He was an undersized man, with bushy eyebrows, cheeks which Gheena
always said looked like pink pork-pies, and a dome-shaped bald head.

Anyone whom he failed to dominate he disagreed with; and as Mat the old
groom used to remark: "The Masther begridged even if the fox to go the
way he’d like himself."

He had been out on some mysterious business, which embraced visits to
the coastguards, a cryptic and reluctant silence, and a look of
impatience.

Sitting down to tea, he discussed the war with Mrs. Weston, becoming
deeply pessimistic when she piped out her contempt of Germany, and then
having left her floundering in a red sea of doubt and despair, would
immediately explain how it all could be ended in a month, provided
such-and-such plans were carried out, and if instead of Lord Kitchener
and General French there were a few men unencased in red tape and not
stale from custom of mimic warfare—a fresh brain in fact, such as he
himself might bring, to plot and hew and smash until it was over.

The two played see-saw over the cold, slim cakes, until Mrs. Weston
asked Dearest George what he might think of this wild idea of Gheena’s,
of gathering up hounds to eat foxes, because the farmers seemed worried
about losing a few chickens.

"So unpatriotic of them, grumbling, with the hay at four pounds a ton,"
she said blandly.

It was, in fact, this way of putting it which made Dearest George
immediately favour the prospect.

He said sharply that he could not see why, if it was at all feasible,
Gheena should make silly objections.

Gheena opened her mouth—and shut it—wisely.

"The claims are positively pouring in," said George Freyne irritably.
"There were three women and James Macavee here to-day, all with tales of
dead geese and hens."

"And even if the common herds was all they had to be pratin’ over," put
in Barty.  "But here’s one chattin’ of Orpinntons, an’ the next of
Leggyhorns, an’ another that paid tuppence apiece for eggs of the
slim-mouthed Rocks, the lord liftenant an’ lady havin’ them all sot up
an’ above themselves with some schame for fancy breeds.  An’ the name
alone bein’ all that’s right," added Barty, "seein’ that a depot for
maybe Speckledy Sussexes ’ll be but twenty yards away from some woman
that just keeps what she gits, an’ the two flocks rootin’ out in the one
place.  When ’twas claims for hins it could be put up with; but when
it’s claims for the schamers out of Dublin, then I tell you it’s money."

"Barty came over about it," said Mrs. Freyne.  "Did you, Barty, to ask
Mr. Freyne his opinion?"

"I did not, ma’am," said Barty placidly, "nor think of such nonsense.
It would be bether for ye to take the cup, Miss, an’ Crabbit nosin’
around it; but if we could gather even thim objecs of dogs, an’ to show
the red coats an’ all, it might be the way it would make them think we
was kapin’ up the counthry, an’ good in nonsense."

Gheena, now greatly excited, said that she would go the very next day to
see about the hounds.  Darby had old kennels at his place.

When Dearest George intimated curtly that he must take the car next day,
as he had to drive to the coastguard station at the far side of the
harbour, Gheena replied that she could walk.  "The nearest Dayly was
quite close, and even if the farthest were farther on——"

Darby said "Yes," and picked up the knitting thoughtfully.

"Well, it was, that was all.  And you can come, Darby, and meet me at
the cross roads below Macinerny’s Public House, and drive me the rest of
the way."

Violet Weston, smoking a cigarette, wanted to know if there was any real
fear of anything happening, as there was so much fuss about coastguards.

"Our ships will never let anything happen," she said stoutly.

"Henry Ashleigh is gone," burst out George Freyne, "to drive a motor.  I
forgot to tell you.  I’d go myself, but I’m too useful here."

"You haven’t applied for anything yet, have you?"  Gheena turned with
crushing directness to Basil.

"Well, you see, I’m in the pay of the Government, and only the
Government can let me go," he said quietly. "If the drainage works were
shut up, all those men who bought the farms on the understanding that
they would be drained for them would be cheated."

To this Miss Freyne observed freezingly that she would have thought an
older man could have looked after drains, and drummed on the tea-table,
laying down her knitting.

Barty raised his battered hunting cap to say good-night. As he turned he
shaded his keen old eyes, and looked out at the ship of rocks just
visible in the grey dusk.

"I never seen such a man as the ould Professor for beltin’ around the
cliffs," remarked Barty, "crackin’ thim rocks with a hammer that can
only be irritaytin’ thim, an’ off back with picks and bits that he is
gropin’ over till two in the mornin’s, behind his specs.  A tax on ile
’d be the bad one for him," said Barty slowly.

A little withered thing, he went off briskly, one leg slightly shorter
than the other, one arm a little stiff. His collar-bones had grown
almost weary of being mended; one thumb was bent in, and a little finger
crooked, as if perpetually poised to hover politely over food.  But
Barty was hale and active still, and thought mournfully how much he
would have liked to come out to hunt hounds again himself, a post which
his broken leg and subsequent ill-health had taken from him.

He skirted the clipped laurels, passed under the vast arch, put up as a
gateway in almost all old yards, and peered into the kitchen to ask the
big peppery Anne, the cook, "If firin’ was short, that the cakes wasn’t
baked above."

"Didn’t I put them on for Miss Gheena, and mustn’t the Missus have them
out for herself?" said Anne good-humouredly.  "Terrible times, Barty!
To be lookin’ above in the air for thim Zepherills they do talk about,
and Donellan the coastguard havin’ chat about the underground ships
bein’ about beside the coast watchin’ us, till they’ve a chance to
swhoop."

Barty then gave some lurid details as to the life on Bretham Island,
where the officers dined in the cellars, sitting on the ammunition,
"they were so afraid of it being struck."

"If I was to be flyin’," Anne observed, as she deposited a large leaf of
pastry on a gigantic pie.

Barty said "Yes" politely.  Anne weighed fourteen stone.

"I’d fly," said Anne darkly, as she opened the oven door, "where—where
flyin’ ’d be of use," she added. "Not hither an’ over just to say there
was a man here an’ a gun there, but off to Berlin.  An’ if I didn’t drop
what ’d hate him up on the Kayser my name isn’t Anne Dwyer.  Th’ ould
vilyin.  Isn’t Paddy Hanratley’s life lost be his devilment, in that
retrate from Mongs?  He is on to-day’s paper."

Barty abstracted the _Irish Times_ from the dresser and read the news
greedily.  He raised his head to tell the cook, now surrounded by a halo
of several attentive maids, that the land was sown with spies.

"Two holy nuns taken in Cork," said Barty.  "I had it for a fact from me
aunt’s cousin be marriage, her nephew being husband to the landlady’s
dather.  An’ the two of thim takin’ lodgin’s, sayin’ they was out for
charity, an’ God save us, didn’t the little gerril carry in hot wather
one mornin’ without knockin’, an’ out she runs, for their caps was off,
an’ the two big faces of men above the bedclothes.  Masther Darby says
they beyant are going to make a shot to invade us, the vilyins, an’
spies here is mappin’ out the very ripples on the say, an’ every turf
sod in the land, so as to be ready for them."

"Me Dadda has us towlt," began Maria the between-maid, "I am slicin’ the
pyates, Mrs. Dwyer, ma’am, for the fryin’.  Me Dadda has it they’ll come
frindly with no waypons on them; not another penny, then, need we pay
for the land we has bought, an’ the hay barns, nor nothin’."

"The Germans bein’ such gran’ men they can live without money," said
Barty dryly.  "God send ye’re Dadda sinse, Maria Harty, an’ something to
do besides clanin’ his boots markin’ time on Sundays with the
Volunteers."

Then Phil the groom coming in, observed: "That he’d seen a German
Frollin that was maid to some at the hotel.  An’ bottled plums she
clapped into a stew that she had leave to make.  An’ quare soorts of
sossidges they’d get over the wather, black as the coals, Anne, an’
solid."

Barty folded up the paper, sighing as he did so; then he leant forward.

"What is that ould Professor knocking chips out of the rocks for?" he
whispered darkly.

Anne the cook sat down heavily, and prayed to the heavens above her to
see her safe from harm, with all their talk.

"Makin’ channels for submarines, he might be, with his hammer," she
whispered fearfully.  "Oh, good evenin’ to ye, Barty.  Good evenin’.
There could be no good behind his black specs," went on Anne fearfully.
"God betune us an’ harrum; no good at all.  An’ there is the pie
burnin’, an’ all the fault of that ould Kayser," she added, as she
rolled with a wail to the oven to announce that the grannut ornymints
she even drew out were black as a Germin’s heart, and to scold everyone
quite impartially and without resentment for the occurrence, they
putting professors into her head.

Upstairs Mrs. Freyne was consulting Dearest as to whether the Army was
really retreating, or whether it was only reported so as to deceive the
Germans and bring forward recruits.

Dearest adjusted his glasses to explain pompously that going backwards
was not advancing, and to illustrate with the flower-vases until one
fell off never to stand upright again, and Gheena went to dress
hurriedly.

Her big room looked out to the sea.  It was high up, and she could see,
when it was light, the restless waters beyond the point as well as the
calmer stretch shown by the gap in the trees.

Leaning out, the soft dampness of the autumn air welcome after the
stuffy heat of the drawing-room, Gheena thought she saw a flicker of
light far away just where the cliffs were honeycombed by endless caves.

"I don’t believe—in—any drains," said Gheena to the night very severely.
"And I should certainly go to be a nurse if it was not for the knitting
club."

Gheena’s room possessed the advantage of a side door reached by a narrow
flight of stairs just beneath it. Dearest showing signs of irritation at
trails made by damp bathing dresses and Crabbit’s paws on the polished
hall, Gheena had taken over this door for herself and ran from it, in
the morning generally, clad in nothing but her bathing dress, to return
dripping under a light mackintosh, with Crabbit barking at her bare
heels.

She bathed, too, sometimes on hot summer nights; delighting in the
dripping flames which fell from her finger, and the blue fire streaks as
she struck out.  These night baths, when her mother reposed in a room
which gave oblations to hygiene with a slightly opened window, behind
which thick curtains were carefully drawn, were only known to the
housemaid and the cook, who considered them outrageous, but said
nothing.

"I should like to bathe to-night.  Crabbit, you’re snuffling.  You
couldn’t come.  And we might, after dinner, Crabbit, though it is
October, after we are baked downstairs."

Dearest George disliking draughts, the library curtains were always
closely drawn on still nights, and the shutters closed when a wind blew;
also, there was always a fire. He sat there now, thinking; the problem
of Gheena troubled George Freyne deeply.  His objection to the Dower
House, which lurked in a gloom of trees on the very edge of the cliff,
increased hourly.  A stealthy backwater came fawning to the end of the
garden, casting up chill salt airs from its slowly moving waters, yet
sea-like enough to expose an unsightly stretch of shingle and rock at
low tide, and to sap in a mean, secretive way at the protecting wall of
the garden, picking away constant gaps. Castle Freyne became Gheena’s,
when she married, and a nephew of George Freyne’s, who combined meekness
of mind, strong conceit with plump cheeks and an Irish accent, had been
decided upon as Gheena’s future spouse.

In fact, failing Gheena, he was the next heir following a life tenancy
by Matilda Freyne, so it was only right.

This Lancelot Freyne had been considered too delicate to go to school,
and had strayed to manhood in his home, tyrannized over by his too fond
mother.  Now having dutifully ridden to hounds, gone out shooting, and
applied his mind to the courtship ordered by his mother, Lancelot had
upset all calculations by immediately getting a commission from the
Militia and going off to train in a camp in England.

Castle Freyne was quite large enough for everyone, but Gheena, as owner,
might show a still more marked desire for open windows, unguarded by
curtains or shutters, and also for various innovations which made a
comfort-loving soul shiver apprehensively.  In any case, it would be
hers when she was twenty-five.

Gheena, coming down to dinner in white, was exceedingly good to look at,
and with strangers at Dunaleen Camp Mr. Freyne grew anxious.

The night fell in a mist of grey stillness, broken by a taint whimper of
little waves weeping as they broke upon the rocks.

Gheena put on a black cloak, wrapped her head in a Lusky veil and
slipped away to the shore.  It was cold to bathe, but she scarcely knew
what she was going out to look for.  Some patrol ships, coastguards
tramping—anything to show her that war raged somewhere, despite the grey
peace upon Ireland.  Her mother had already begun to re-read the papers
and ask for explanations, until her husband fell asleep; then she would
fall asleep herself, until ten o’clock, when she invariably awoke with
great vigour, and hoped Dearest George would not lose his figure for his
bad habit of sleeping in his chair, and then read a novel until eleven,
when she put out all the lamps, drank hot milk, and went to bed.

Crabbit scuttled into the undergrowth, crashing through it with little
short yelps, as he scented rabbits.  Gheena stepped on to where the low
cliffs jutted to oppose the sea.  The waters whispered, fretting,
lapping, sucking through the rocks; lifted on the coming tide the fringe
of brown seaweed rustled faintly as it awoke to the life of the sea.  A
sleeping row of sea-birds on a peak of brown rock, a blur of white just
visible.

Gheena had put on tennis shoes; she moved soundlessly, sure-footed,
across the still uncovered rocks, stooped at the edge of the tide, where
it lapped deep and cool, to put her hands in, and see the blue drip run
off her fingers back to the gleaming tide.

At this point, Crabbit, having mislaid her, uttered a yell of anguish,
and hurled himself noisily across the rocks, his unerring nose down.

This onrush was stopped by something solid, which melted and slipped
with sudden outcry into a fairly deep pool.

As the something rose and groped, it said aloud several things of
extreme pungency, and wished to know what the—well—earthly dickens
sea-serpents or wild goats were out on the rocks for at midnight,
knocking people down for.

The voice bearing a distinct resemblance to Mr. Basil Stafford’s, Gheena
observed aloud, calmly, that it was neither a sea-serpent nor a goat.

"But only Crabbit tracking me, with you in his way."  And then she
wished to know why he did not come out at once.

Mr. Stafford said something rather indistinctly, and then more clearly,
that it seemed to be the damn sea-urchins’ pool; and everywhere he put
his hands down to catch a rock, he had, so far, caught prickles and
couldn’t get out.

The sound of a finger noisily sucked was followed by the smell of hot
metal and the flash of a dark lantern, blinding in the gloom.  By its
rays Basil Stafford swished through the knee-deep water and stepped out
on to dry rocks.

"He took me just under the knees, like an avalanche, that dog," he said
irritably.  "I just jumped in time to get in on my feet.  I’ve sand
shoes on, too.  What on earth," he said, "are you doing down here in the
dark by this hang pool?"

"Looking for submarines," said Gheena dreamily.

Stafford thought dryly that the sea-urchins’ pool would certainly be a
good base, and that perhaps there might be a Dreadnought in the bathing
creek.  He shook his head and by the light of the lantern extracted
prickles from his fingers.

"Anne Dwyer says they all fester," observed Gheena, watching with
interest, "and you’re breaking half of them. Here!"

She took the big brown hand in hers, extracting gently but deftly; Mr.
Stafford insisting, as she said she could see no more, that he felt two
of the worst just in below his first and second fingers, and the light
of the lantern proving quite inadequate to illuminate them.

"And as I said, why Crabbit should have been on the rocks," said
Stafford—"further down, on the fat place—and why he chose that pool."

"There isn’t any fat place," said Gheena.  "And why"—she raised her
eyes—"why were you out?" she asked emphatically.

"It’s right in the muscle, and I shall never use those fingers again.
I—well—I saw—queer lights," said Stafford, after a pause.  "Chaps here
might start—er—smuggling again.  And—oh, good Lord!" Crabbit barked at
the sharp yell of anguish.

"I was only just using the pin of my brooch to burrow, as you were so
sure there was a prickle there."  Gheena re-pinned her brooch with hurt
dignity.  "Smuggle tobacco!  One doesn’t think of that kind of smuggling
nowadays," she said bitingly.  "It’s smuggling German emperors and
admirals and ’U’ boats."

The lantern had suddenly been extinguished, and the noise of sucking,
mingled with grunts of pain, came from the gloom beside her.  A sound of
footsteps coming cautiously could be heard on the strip of shingle at
high-water mark.

"The coastguards," said Stafford.  "Er—I say, hadn’t you better?—they
won’t see us if you sit down.  It’s late."

Gheena replied that the last yell might even have produced the patrol
ship from the point; and as she had known Matthew O’Hara and Tim Linsham
all her life, she really did not see why they should not see her now,
especially when they could not in that light.

So they sped lightly back across the rocks, unheard until Crabbit
growled with emphasis.

Someone said "Shucks," in tones of distant alarm.

Stafford flashed the light again upon the spectacled, wondering face of
Professor Machaffy of Bee-bar-oo, somewhere in New South Wales, who
again said "Shucks," before he became a shadow in the gloom.

"I take a little walk almost every night," said the Professor mildly,
"before I go in to sort specimens.  It fills the lungs with ozone.  And
you!  You also take a little walk."  There was a distinct quiver of
understanding laughter in his good-natured old voice.

"On fine nights the unseen world is very beautiful, because as a lost
love, you remember all its perfections," went on the Professor.  "The
darkness is Zimmerian," he added blandly.

"Never quite lost the German accent, Professor?" said Basil easily.
There was a pause; the Professor, judging by the shower of shingle,
appeared to have kicked some of it.

"After several years’ study—there," he said slowly. "It is difficult,
Mr. Stafford.  I’m learning, as in war they study closely," he added.
"We have no such scientists in England.  I bid you good-night.  It is
time for me to get in."

They could hear him chuckle again as he shuffled off.

One by one the lights at Castle Freyne were blinking out; Matilda Freyne
was going to bed.

"And you?" said Stafford, a little anxiously to Gheena.

"I—oh!" Gheena explained her side entrance.

Mr. Stafford said if that was so, he had just found a new and vicious
prickle in the palm of his hand.  She could feel it—there was no need of
light.

He sat down in the short, sweet grass and Gheena sat beside him, her
nimble, deft fingers pressing at the spot he guided them to.

The lap and whisper of the coming tide was clear in the grey stillness.

"Crabbit—Crabbit, you are breathing hard, just in my ear," said Gheena.
"Go away.  I can’t get the thing.  Sit still, Mr. Stafford."

Stafford leant back a little to listen to the aggressive snuffle of
Crabbit at his right side and some distance away.

                             *CHAPTER III*

"There is three of them here inside, Miss," said Mary Casey, looking
round.  "Doatee, Beauty, an’ Colleen.  Colleen had three pups, but he
has them reared this long ways’ back, an’ one is gone to Marty, me
cousin, for the sheeps.  Indeed, then, I am sure an’ certain, Miss, that
neyther Matt nor Jim would oppose any wish ye have for the dogs, an’ I’d
be glad to be out of feedin’ them myself.  Matt is in Bedford, Miss, and
Jim in Aldershot presently, an’ ye can be afther writin’ to them both."

Gheena asked a little feebly for the other hounds.

Young Andrew Casey, aged twelve, issued from behind a curtain of shyness
to observe that these three were the besht dogs in the lot.  "Colleen
can enthrap a cat as well as a hare," he said proudly.  "And Beauty
there, when he do catch a rot, ’d bring it in to his pups an’ not ate it
himself."

Mrs. Casey told her son not to be gabbin’ before the genthry, so Andrew
withdrew again behind the haystacks, a watchful eye on his favourites.

"There is two pairs at Danny’s, Miss."

"And one is not a hound at all," chimed in the now irresistible Andrew,
"but a torrier.  He is Dandy’s pup."

Dandy, busily engaged in chasing fleas, raised a yellow head when her
name was mentioned.

"Hould ye’re whisht, Andy, the child is demented for them dogs, Miss.
He’d ax no bether than be afther them. An’ don’t be mindin’ him, Miss
Gheena, for the torrier Doatie’s pup as well, with a gran’ huntin’ nose
on him."

Doatie, a pied hound with bandy legs, wagged a pleased tail, and threw
his tongue to show his breeding.

Gheena had not found Darby waiting for her, so had taken a short cut to
the Caseys’, found its apparently straight way barred a boggy trench,
and had had to climb up a steep hill, where slates and small quagmires
lived cheek by jowl in united friendship.  To step squelchily from one
and slip with a sharp slaty grate into another had proved tiring.  Also,
Gheena, inspired by Violet Weston’s blue suede shoes, had put on a pair
with bright buckles, which she looked at proudly until she missed her
way, and then remembered remorsefully the slighted brogues in her room
at Castle Freyne.  The charm of comparing her feet with the widow’s had
now completely evaporated.

Marty Casey’s, where two more pairs of the pack could be seen, was
pointed out to her, a thin trail of smoke marking its chimney.

"The road to it does be leadin’ around," said Mrs. Casey; "but across
the hills it is not a mile only.  Would ye say the dirty piece ’d be
good walkin’ to-day, Andy?"

"I would not," said Andrew, appearing suddenly, holding Beauty by her
forelegs.  "I went down a foot in it meself yestherday," he added
briefly; "an’ I light, not like yerself."

"There’s sphots, even if ye go discreet, that is onaisy, but I do go
that way meself."

Gheena chose the road with decision.  She wrote down the regiments of
Jim and Matt and sighed drearily.

Several hounds were billeted in small cottages in the neighbourhood, and
she meant to try to see them all. But the conciliation of the Caseys
being necessary before any others could be looked at, she shook hands
and tramped away.

Andrew, trotting beside her, asked wistfully if she was sot on the dogs.

"Beauty do be sleepin’ with me," he said shyly.  "I lets him in anonst
an’ me Mama aslheep."

Gheena, seeing something glimmer behind bright eyelashes, promised Andy
that if they hunted, she would lend him Ratty, her Welsh pony, for every
meet.  This was a small mouse-coloured animal, which attacked large
banks as if they were a ladder, but always got to the other side without
mishap, and which could go all day.  Walls were not often seen, and
timber he either went over or under, in both cases generally dislodging
his rider.  He had a mouth of iron and the self-will of Lucifer, coupled
with complete determination to get after hounds, but he was absolutely
safe and neither kicked nor bucked.

"Every nice day if we hunt, then, Andy," said Gheena. "And—and you
wouldn’t like to see all the foxes dead and none to go after when the
poor huntsmen come back from the war."

The light of desire in Andy’s eyes showed that he would now put up with
even the loss of Beauty as a bedfellow. He knew Ratty well.

A doubt concerning a "ridin’ throuser" being solved by the promise of a
pair of his very own, Andy’s eyes sparkled wildly, and to show his
gratitude he offered guidance by the short cut, explaining that he had
not even an eye sthuck to his feet when he crossed in it yestherday, the
two dogs an’ Dandy bein’ close on a hare; so it might be right if
crossed careful.

Gheena chose the road.  She had often jogged up it out hunting; now it
seemed to wind interminably, and the surface to grate away under each
step she took.

High banks, with blackberry vines and honeysuckle sprawling over them,
kept away the wind.  Gheena toiled up a steep glen and thought out what
she would say to Darby.  In the glen the clinging friendship of the
blackberry and honeysuckle gave way to bare red banks spangled with
slabs of drab slate, which caught and gave back the heat of the sun,
little oozing trickles of moisture being quite insufficient to cool
them.

The glen ended at cross roads.  Gheena stood still there.  She was
extremely hot, her feet ached in the buckled shoes, and she eyed the
winding brown ribbon of road turning towards the left towards Marty
Casey’s house with bitter dislike.

It was a road advancing without apparent method, turning up to the
right, then finding that scenery dull, and running off to the left
again, climbing steep hills which it apparently might have avoided, and
avoiding others which would have shortened its way by miles, its
surface, two ruts and gravelly stones, and its edges inhospitable
ditches of boggy water.

It was only the prospect of telling Darby of his slackness which made
Gheena draw a long breath and look toward the road with gloomy
determination.  Perhaps Marty Casey had a trap or a cart which he could
drive her back to the town in.

The tuff-tuff of a motor made her look round hopefully; a long grey nose
glided round the sharp corner where the roads branched to the right, and
Basil Stafford put down his foot-brake with a jar.

"I was out at Cloony Point, and I thought that I might find you and
Dillon seeing the hounds," he said.

Gheena greeted him ill-humouredly.  His grey tweed suit was so
completely unlike khaki, and she was in the mood to be jarred.

She wished to know irrelevantly, "Why roads could not go straight to
places?  Up and down, and round about," said Gheena, with a note of
hysterical over-fatigue in her voice, "and everywhere, as if they were
playing ’Round the Mulberry Bush’ instead of going to Marty Casey’s. You
make drains.  Why don’t they go straight?"

Stafford thought apologetically that perhaps it was because there were
several places to go to.  In the still soft air little trails of
blue-brown smoke showed where houses stood.

When Gheena merely snorted, unconvinced, he also explained that in
places road-builders found boggy spots or solid rock, and it was more
expedient to go round these obstacles to avoid expense.

"People with sense," said Gheena witheringly, "make flat roads.  I only
thought you might have known.  Of course, drains are so simple."

Here Mr. Stafford very humbly offered her a lift, and asked about the
hounds.

"Crooked-legged, splay-footed beagles," said Gheena "and Dandys and
sheep-dogs.  But we could ride after them," she said, brightening up;
"they would hunt."

"A Dandy Dinmont," said Stafford absently, "wouldn’t hunt far."

Gheena replied icily that she had never mentioned Dandy Dinmonts.  Even
the Dunkillen people did not hunt over Scotch terriers, and there was no
wit in being absurd.

"I—you mentioned Dandies."  Stafford’s cheeks were a little red.  "Shall
I drive you on?"

"I can walk," said Gheena coldly.  To drive with Basil Stafford would be
to tacitly condone his shortcomings.

"Oh, very well.  I’m sorry."  A sly start sent the grey car throbbing
into life; she began to back for the turn home.

Gheena was very tired; she grew white, and the stately hills seemed to
gain in size; before her stretched the interminable badly laid-out
mountain road.

"And you’d much better drive," said Stafford, humbly again.  "It’s quite
a long way—if you want to see those hounds.  It’s important."

Gheena got in slowly.

"Or—er—see Dandies," he added as he put in the clutch.

"Dandy was the mother," said Gheena impatiently, "Dandy the terrier.
And the pup is some kind of hound one side.  I said Dandy, not Dandies."

Stafford stopped the car suddenly.  He was sorry to disturb her, but he
had forgotten to put in petrol.

Far below them lay the sea, dimpling and flashing in the sunlight,
greeny dark by the cliffs, grey blue in the long neck of the harbour, a
great carpet of diamond points outside.  Leeshane rose its long grey
hump from the flash; Innisfail was vaguely purple.  Here and there on
the great splashing water-way a red sail glinted, or a smudge of smoke
hung darkly as some steamer thrashed its uneasy way to harbour.

Gheena sat on the step of the car, looking out.  Just behind these hills
and across the harbour they hunted. It was hilly and boggy; there were
woods and lakes, but patches of grass gave them short glimpses of
gallops, and when one got used to it there was joy in the scramble: in
hounds hunting over the heathery hills and the ever-constant fear of
losing them when they vanished into a glen, or one of the thick little
pine woods which were set as dark emeralds in the grey hill-sides. Joy
in the perfection of those bursts over grass fields with low banks to
jump.  And quite far inland, if their fox was kind enough to avoid a
chain of lakes and a big bog, there was quite a stretch of good country.
It was fox-hunting with its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its
mystery of uncertainty.  The little field down there was as keen
watching hounds run as though they rode in far-famed Leicestershire, and
crossed the fox-hunting paradise in Limerick.

Peace hung over the land; the withering heather gave tinge of purple
still; the sun caught the slate beds on the hills, making them gleam
dull red and brown, and below there was the wonder of the sea.

"One cannot realize it—here," almost whispered Gheena.  "Dust and the
pound of feet, and the rattle of guns, and men out to kill each other in
this quiet world."

"France was as quiet as this—two months ago," Basil said quietly.  "Rows
of poplars, long white roads, sluggish rivers, great patches of
yellowing corn, grapes growing purple.  I’ve been at a big camp," he
said, "and seen and heard the rattle and the tramp and the men’s faces
come out of the cloud of yellow dust—kindly, merry faces, all so keen
for war—and now all fighting...."

"For us," said Gheena very deliberately—"fighting."

"For—us," he said after a pause, looking straight at her.  It was Gheena
who flushed; except when speared on by patriotism, she was naturally
polite and averse to hurting people’s feelings.

Something in the flash in Stafford’s eye made her look away for quite a
long time at the nearest smudge of smoke.

An answering flash hidden from him rose in her own eyes.  One could
serve one’s country by other ways than the knitting of stockings.  When
she turned, she had smoothed accusation from her expression and even
smiled.

"It is almost impossible to realize," she said dreamily, and with a
clarified innocence of having meant anything by that emphasized "is."

Basil Stafford eyed her suspiciously, until a sudden smile made him
quite good-looking.  He took out a pair of glasses.

"That’s a liner," he said.  "See the far-off steamer, and those are two
tramps with food for us.  What if the Germans fulfil the threat they are
whispering of already and cut off our supplies?  It would be reality
then, Miss Freyne, over here."

"We could burn turf and eat chickens," said Gheena briefly, "and catch
fish.  We need never starve here. And is that petrol in yet?  I told
Darby Malachi’s public house, and I waited there and left a message."

"You said McInerny’s," said Stafford, screwing down the tank.  "Not
Malachi’s."

"McInerny’s—no.  Ask Darby."

Gheena found people who contradicted her extremely tiresome.  She
flashed an awe-inspiring glance at her pilot and repeated "Malachi’s"
angrily.  Lancelot never dared to contradict her; he might disagree
vaguely, but he only did it in his mind and not aloud; or to his mother
afterwards, who would say, sighing, that heiresses were always
wrong-minded; but that, after all, once there was money nothing
mattered, and that it was only in small houses with one sitting-room
that quarrelling was really objectionable.  Lancelot had been duly
instructed that he was to marry his cousin Gheena.

"Well, if I said McInerny’s I meant Malachi’s, and Darby might know the
other would be quite out of my way, unless I went to fetch the letters,
and it was too early for that," said Gheena, unruffled.  "Is—there—any
news to-day?"

Basil stopped the car to pull out a telegram, one crisply short.

"We are retreating.  They are close to Paris," he said quietly.  "The
roses in the papers are red roses out yonder, Miss Freyne.  No break in
our line.  Retreating in perfect order.  Kaiser’s time-table wrong.
Germans fed on beet.  The nonsense of it all absorbed with boiled eggs
at breakfast.  Eggs put up by the war too."

"This car," said Gheena, offended at the mating of war news and boiled
eggs, "came up Lishna Hill quite quickly.  Did she do it on second?"

"Well, no—on top," said Stafford apologetically.  "No load, you see."

"She must be a very powerful car," said Gheena suspiciously.  "A twenty,
is she?"

"Well, yes," said Stafford meekly, suppressing the extra twenty-five.
"Yes, I—was given her, you see, by the——"

He stopped short at the word to swing in a narrow gate, while Gheena,
leaning back, wondered darkly why a humble inspector or overseer of
drainage works should own so powerful a two-seater.  Her active mind was
so full of conjectures that she awoke with a start to their stoppage in
a small field fenced by banks topped with slates, and was greeted by a
small woman with ill-tempered eyes.

The prospects of getting rid of four useless hounds appeared to appeal
to her instantly.

"There bein’ no one to hunt afther them now, an’ blow Jim’s bugle, and
yellow male up to the height of Hiven."

The four hounds, now produced, lounged out for inspection from happy
slumber on roasting slates, stretching themselves and yawning.

Daisy, Bridgie, Grandjer and Greatness were of much the same breed as
the four first seen.  Daisy was a dog hound, names being irrelevant,
with some strain of foxhound in him; the others were not particular as
to ancestry, but they could all hunt.  Grandjer was black and tan, with
a docked tail, because, old Casey explained, Jim thought from the colour
of him that he was likely to be a torrier.

This was clearly young Dandy.

This Mrs. Casey proffered tea.  It was laid in the best parlour, a room
of leaden atmosphere, with a great deal of fancy-work about.  The grate,
instead of cascades of sooty paper, was genteelly hidden by a painted
fire-screen, covered with crimson daffodils with purple leaves, and a
stork, greatly disturbed at his surroundings, flapping over them.  This,
they were informed, was the work of Anastasia Casey above at the
convent.

Tea was welcome, but oppressed by fashion; appearing on a japanned tray,
with slices of baker’s bread cut neatly, and pats of butter to apply to
it.

Gheena yearned for soda cake, hot—she had seen one in the kitchen—but
ate the crumbling papery-crusted slices with resignation, while Mrs.
Casey hoped it wasn’t too stale entirely, and discussed the war as
something one saw in the papers.

"There was talk of Tom Guinane’s goin’," she said, pouring out more tea.
"Would ye have a neg with it, Miss Gheena, or a taste of jam?  The
appetite’s lavin’ ye—but he said he couldn’t lave the boat.  I would not
thrust them Guinanes, anyways," added Mrs. Casey. "There’s too much
politics in them, spachin’ an’ chattin’ instead of working steady, an’
then laying the blame on the King if there isn’t the price of a pint in
ye’re pocket; that’s the soort them Guinanes are, Miss."

Gheena nodded.  Tom Guinane was a Sinn Feiner, blackly opposed, it would
sometimes appear, to everything except all land for nothing, taxes paid
by England, free carriage of all fish.  These, when he was really
brought to bay, were the limits he advanced.

"They are a bad lot out there on Lishannon," said Gheena thoughtfully.

"And in a bad place for a bad lot," put in Basil, "On the point."

Darby Dillon’s crutch banged open the door, and he came in, wanting to
know why he was left for several hours—in fact, until he drove up and
saw Gheena’s mother—waiting, in the wrong place.

"If I said McInerny’s I meant Malachi’s," repeated Gheena impenitently.
"And you must have known, Darby, I wasn’t likely to want to walk across
the shingle to McInerny’s in these shoes."

"Not having been there to put them on," said Darby placidly, and
avoiding Basil’s eye; "but, of course, I might have known, after the
fair Violet’s yesterday. I’ll have hot cake, Mary; I saw some outside."

"If I hadn’t been afraid of offending her," said Gheena, thinking
regretfully of two dry slices swallowed languidly.

"You were talking of Lishannon and the lot there," said Darby.  "There
was a chap round last year lodging there, and I’d say a lot of someone’s
money stayed behind him.  There’s queer talk down there in the dusk, I
tell you."

"What could them foreigners do here an’ they not havin’ the English to
back them?" said Mrs. Casey contemptuously.  "Father Dan gave out from
the althar that there was no fear of any Germans here, and he should
know, for he was at a mission in China for three years."

"So he’d know all about heathens," said Darby gravely.

"He does so," said Mrs. Casey.

"I hears that young widdy below does be takin’ Tom Guinane an’ looking
for mackerels," she said, "an’ payin’ him five shillin’ a day, and none
to tell her the robbery. That Tom is the broth of a rogue.  Will I lave
in the dogs to the back of yere stheam carriage, Misther Darby?"

"You will not," said Darby firmly, "unless Miss Gheena comes to hold
them in."

"They might all be aisy but Grandjer.  An’ a cat couldn’t show its
whiskers on the road but he’d lep out an’ up as if it ’twas an air
balloon," Mrs. Casey said thoughtfully.  "Bether to throttle them up and
let one of the boys carry them to the great house."

Basil Stafford hastily interfered to say that they did not want the
hounds dead, and was told sharply by Darby that throttlin’ was merely an
expression signifying roping up.

"If Mrs. De Burgho Keane wasn’t coming to tea to-morrow," said Gheena,
walking stiffly, with footsore feet, "I’d go to look at the kennels,
Darby.  There are about ten other things called hounds about, and they
could be collected late when they heard from the Master."

"If he vetoes it," said Darby, "thinking we’ll spoil his foxes by making
them run too slow, we’ll hunt something, Gheena, if it’s only a herring.
Crabbit is outside thinking of fighting with Grandjer."

Crabbit was disputing the entrance to a rat-hole, every hair on his red
body bristling, with Grandjer unabashed, gurgling out defiance beside
him.

Crabbit, removing himself with reluctance, got into the long, low
two-seater and brooded in the wrongs of life. Gheena limped to Darby’s
car.

"I saw Mrs. Weston with Keefe out on the coast road," said Basil, "and
the Ford appeared to be stuck.  They were at her for half an hour."

"And—you never helped her?" Gheena swung round.

"Oh, well, I saw them from Dunleep Hill, you see," he said
apologetically.  "I was just looking down at the road, and saw.  One
watches the sea these days," he added, hesitating a little.

"What she sees in that pink peony, Keefe?" said Darby. "A smart little
woman."

Basil said "Taking" absently.  "I’m dining there to-night," he went on,
"to hold cards.  Not to play Bridge, because only two of us know how,
and if we get against the other two, they upset us so much we invariably
lose, and if we cut them they upset us still more, and I get to bed with
my brain very like a piano in a damp climate.  The old Professor makes
the fourth."

"To-night, then, I make a fifth," said Gheena.  "Crabbit and I are
walking over at nine.  What!  It’s not safe out so late alone, Mr.
Stafford?  Do crabs and jelly-fish attack one, or coastguards looking
out for nothing on earth?"

Darby’s small car bounced down the hill with the energy, over ruts, due
to her short wheel base.  She took hills with a grunt of effort, and was
unpleasantly opposed to the gliding of Stafford’s two-seater.

Mrs. Weston, seated on a bench outside her cottage, with very brilliant
orange suede shoes liberally displayed, ran across to stop them, and to
inquire eagerly about the hounds.  She had already written about a
saddle, and that kindly Mr. Keefe was looking out for a horse for her.
Darby said mildly that it would be well if she looked out herself, and
smiled softly.  Harold Keefe had already gone in for some horse-coping.

In the matter of horses, it was evident that Violet Weston was
distressingly feminine.  She chattered about light-weights and the
easiness of finding hunters for a lady as if Queen Victoria still
reigned.

"Mr. Keefe advises a side-saddle," she said, "as he’s afraid Mrs. De
Burgho Keane doesn’t like innovations. But neither do I, so I am going
to risk riding my own way."

There was something very taking in Violet Weston’s bright eyes and
slightly squeaky voice.

Darby said so as they drove on.

"Only they seem to be a decade behind the times in Australia," he said,
as he swung in the wide iron gates where two stone animals snarled
indefinitely at either side.

Darby found George Freyne on the steps, examining the butcher’s book by
the failing light, and raving at the cost of war.  Matilda, his wife,
was sitting down—she never stood up for long—and blandly suggesting that
it did not matter, as one could eat chickens and game, and herrings
would be coming in, that is.  Didn’t Dearest George think so?

"And lobsters, if Gheena would get Phil to set out the baskets."
Dearest produced a pencil, with which he commenced to write down
suggestions for economies.

Less cakes for tea; there were baskets of eggs used up every week; less
bacon for breakfast; a rigid allowance in the kitchen.

"Didn’t you sell your bullocks for more than you expected?" Darby asked,
as he put a warm cloak over the Darracq’s bonnet.  "And if Reedy pays
you more, you must pay Reedy more, mustn’t you?"

This philosophy proving distasteful, Darby took out nis crutch and
shuffled nimbly up the steps.

Gheena had stopped to talk to a fair-haired boy who, when you looked
closer, appeared to have been a man for years.

The young man, Phil said, was coughing slightly.

"But she’d ate all before her," said Phil cheerily. "What’s that, Ma’am?
I’m to set out lobster pots, mate bein’ up."

"Them Guinanes do be goin’ on at me when I sets out the pots," he
whispered to Gheena.  "Bitther as horse-chestnuts.  But if ye give me a
couple of shillin’s, Miss Gheena, I’ll buy two lobsters from them, an’
no one wiser."

This part of the régime of war economy having been disposed of
satisfactorily, the news was talked of, picture papers, their
illustrations almost aquiver with contempt for Germany, looked at, and
the situation discussed heatedly.

"Some people, or people who know, tell me that there is a regular nest
of spies all along the coast, ready for months," said Darby, as he ate
portions of the sirloin of beef which his host carved with manifest
care.  "Bases for submarines, with oil for them, and even wireless
installations.  Those little houses out there on the cliff could use
those nicely, couldn’t they?"

Gheena was very thoughtful when she set out to Seaview, the intensely
obvious name of so many seaside lodges.  She was going across the beach,
so Darby did not offer to go with her.  He stood leaning on his crutch,
watching her disappear into the shadows, and his sigh as he turned to go
in and play picquet was tinged with impatience.  It is hard to stand
still in life while others walk easily.

One side showed scant trace of injury, the other so twisted and
crippled.  The doctor who had patched him together had told him that in
time the crushed limbs might grow stronger, a broader hope of activity
came to him. But the leg dragged heavily now as he hobbled up the
shallow steps.

Gheena begged Crabbit to let rabbits sleep, and swung down on to the
beach; she could see the lights of a ship at the quay, one which came in
a few times a year with supplies for the villagers.  Someone was pushing
a boat off; she heard the scrape on the shingle.

Crabbit resented the intrusion on his foreshore, and a man’s voice,
sounding uneasily, told him to go home. A stone whizzed, its impact
changing the red dog’s note to one of such swift anger that Gheena could
see someone leaping for sanctuary into the boat.

"It is Miss Gheena.  Call him off, Miss; he’ll ate us."

The moon chose this moment to illuminate the shore, and to show one man
just scuffling over the side of the boat, and a second ensconcing
himself behind some barrels.

"If you hadn’t thrown rocks at him, Tom Guinane," said Gheena angrily,
"he wouldn’t get cross."

Tom Guinane, visibly nervous, swore by the God above him that it was but
a handful of shingle that wouldn’t crush a sherrimp, an’ only thrun
funnin’, he not bein’ sure whose dog it was.

Crabbit came to heel, master of the situation, with one white tooth
bared for inspection, and Gheena watched the loading of the boat.

"Bits of flour an’ things," Guinane told her, "for the shop outside, an’
cruel dear now, Miss, thanks to the war.  Not havin’ much time in the
light since I went to Mrs. Weston, I must do me work be night."

He spoke ill-humouredly, with a perpetual note of being wronged by life.

The boat was pushed off, passing from inertness to life as she swam in
the shallow water.  Gheena could see an array of barrels standing on a
rock, waiting to be loaded. She climbed the cliff path to Seaview with
the ease of good wind and practice, to find the three waiting for her at
the card-table, and Mrs. Weston’s old Swiss nurse just going out to meet
her.

"We thought the gate to the sea path might have been locked," said
Violet Weston.  "Old Berthe loves keys and safety.  She entreats me
unceasingly to go to Switzerland as the only safe and proper place
during the war."

Berthe, who wore ample skirts and rather represented a feminine barrel
crowned with a black cap, came in with syphons and decanters.  She
returned with sandwiches clumsily cut, bade them _Bon nuit_ in a
villainously Swiss accent, and hobbled out.

"Mrs. De Burgho Keane wanted to know if she could be a German in
disguise," giggled Violet, "because the old thing of course talks both
languages.  And Berthe has no sympathy with fighting.  Poor old soul!
she has some relations hard at it in France—two, I think."

Mr. Harold Keefe was mildly in love—sufficiently so as to occasionally
forget to make declarations as he stared at Mrs. Weston, but not
sufficiently to forget common-sense and to try to obtain all suitable
information concerning Paul Weston, deceased, his circumstances in life,
and his last testament.  Gheena knitted when she was dummy, and talked
incessantly of the Bobbery pack without.

Horses must now be made fit, no one had bothered so far.  Mumsie’s
saddle was not even newly stuffed, and Dearest’s two horses were on hay
and bran.

Mrs. Weston decided to put hers on straw and looked surprised because
Stafford and Gheena laughed immoderately, and Keefe choked politely.

"With all this talk of horses," said the Professor patiently, "I wait to
play."

When it was decided that he had not gone three diamonds over Basil’s
three clubs, because when pressed he offered to show that of diamonds he
had but one, the game proceeded, some umbrage being taken to Gheena the
Professor’s partner, leading the ace of diamonds and then another.

"But she might have, in any case," said Violet Weston easily.  "Mr.
Keefe, what shade is my new horse?"

Keefe, who was standing out, said: "Bay, blood bay, with black points."

"Then it’s Casey’s with the foreleg, I suppose.  We’re down two," said
Basil.

"It is not," said Keefe, with deepening complexion.

"Slattery’s, then.  It had such a cold, the remount man wouldn’t look at
it.  They’re are the only two bays."

"I will double them," said the Professor viciously, and was almost put
out, holding five spades, to find that he had not heard correctly.

Basil Stafford offered to see Gheena home.

It was nearly full-tide; the harbour gleamed under the moonlight, with
the shadows black as ink.

The ceaseless voices of the sea whispered through the calm—the distant
creak of a boat at anchor, the lap and suck of the tide, the cry of
sleepless birds.

Oars plashed, leaving a trail of phosphorescent light, low voices
echoed.

"The Guinanes come back for a second load," said Gheena.  "Good night.
I’ll go up from the bathing pool."

She heard his footsteps as he went away, not back to the village, but
down along the beach.  She saw him light a cigarette for a moment, and
then disappear into the black shadows of the cliff.

The hall door at Castle Freyne was still open, a yellow gash of light in
the darkened house.  Darby Dillon leant on his crutch, waiting for her.

Gheena grew hilarious as she discussed the Bridge and the two bays and
the Professor’s still too well-preserved German accent.

"Stafford saw you home?"

"Yes—he—he has gone off along the cliffs," said Gheena.  "Darby, what
kind of a man do you think Basil Stafford is?"

"A decent kind of young fellow—with straight limbs," said Darby slowly.

                              *CHAPTER IV*

When Captain Lindlay had written from the front in pencil, to say he
didn’t mind how they killed foxes as long as they kept the people in
good humour and the committee agreed, and that they could take lessons
from old Barty as to blowing the horn, a committee of four, with a
feminine president, formed itself, to get to work as soon as possible.

George Freyne saw financial difficulties, because covert keepers would
desire to be paid for a find by Grandjer just as if the Dunkillen hounds
had all thrown their tongues in unison; but the absent Master had
foreseen and anticipated this, so that Darby was able to talk quite
firmly of finance.

"Unless one of those terriers gets into a flock of sheep," he said
thoughtfully.  "They are coming over to-morrow, Gheena, and old Barty is
to teach a man how to boil for them; and I am quite sure that Andy Casey
will stay to help."  Here he winked at Andy who had come down to get
orders.

"We’ll hunt with ten couple of fox-hounds’ relations and I can toot the
’Gone away.’"  Here Mr. Keefe, taking out a hunting-horn, made note
hideous and forlorn, but still a sound, and unclasped his pink cheeks
from the mouth-piece with a gasp of triumph.

Darby remarked he looked rather like one of the Mons angels when he was
at it, and he hoped the pack wouldn’t think it was anyone dead in the
parish; but, after all, one must learn.  Here he brayed out "Gone away"
shrilly and clearly, and tried to blow them out with minor success.

Mr. Keefe then commenced to practise again until Mrs. Freyne came in
mildly, to ask Dearest George if it was possible that a German band had
been wrecked in the harbour; and George Freyne, having shrieked, fingers
in ears, for silence, surreptitiously picked up one of the hunting-horns
and tried himself.

When Gheena took Darby’s she smiled, for old Barty had taught her long
ago, and she rang out notes worthy of the absent Master.

"I shall carry one myself," said Gheena proudly. "Dearest, Crabbit will
howl if you make that noise again."

To which Dearest retorted hotly that he supposed she had made queer
noises herself on the beastly trumpet when she began to learn.

"Four of ’em, with copper wanted for shells, too," said Darby
thoughtfully.  "Will you be the first whip, then, Gheena? and I’ll be
the second; any number you like. And George can be Master and Keefe the
other."

"If I do it in public, I’ll make it a whistle," said Freyne hurriedly.
"And Keefe had better, too, judging by the wheezes he made."

"We could raise the horns up and blow the whistles inside them," said
Keefe thoughtfully.  "But, then, if these two blow horns, how are the
dogs to know any order at all?"

"They never did know it," said Darby mildly.  "Little Andy will beat
them with a whip when they run sheep or pigs, and they have forgotten
more about hunting than we ever knew."

"But to take them out of covert," said Keefe, "when it’s blank."

"I suppose they’ll come when they know it is," said Darby thoughtfully.
"You see, they never drew any of ours.  What’s that, Andy?  They often
did unbeknownt. I daresay.  And as to getting them out—what do you say?"

"If there was a fox inside or any of his pups, they’d root them out,"
said Andy firmly.  "Beauty ’d make ’em lep, I’m tellin’ you, an’ if the
foxes got to the din, me Dada ’d go in with a few rocks; we’d gother an’
hunt the dogs away back to us outside."

Darby considered the advisability of the Master, even of a bobbery pack,
collecting donations of rocks from his field, and thought it was better
to wait until occasion arose to think about it.

George Freyne had got the Stores’ list open, and was longing dubiously
at lists of whistles.  Incidentally, he wondered if Lindlay was one of
those jealous fellows who would object to another Master in his absence;
and added, after a pause, that he’d heard once of some chap who had his
neck broken in a hunting cap.  Some Lord Something, so perhaps Darby had
better be Master.

He was too much occupied by whistles to hear Darby say that ropes
appeared equally dangerous at times, as he directed Mrs. Freyne, who had
just oozed in and wondered if it was late, to write to the Stores for
the loudest whistle they had.

"With two Masters," said Darby, "I wonder whom the hounds will obey?"

"The sorra the sowl but me Dada," comforted young Andy from the window.
"Only Beauty ’d follow meself to destruction, the craythur.  He came to
mass onst an’ rose a bawl, an’ Father Pat prayin’!  An’ not a move out
of him till me Dada rocked him with Mrs. Maguire’s prayer-book."

"Mrs. De Burgho Keane is late; don’t you think so, Dearest?" said Mrs.
Freyne, shutting up her letter to the Stores.  As it appeared in George
Freyne’s opinion that Mrs. De Burgho Keane was always too early, Matilda
Freyne merely looked out, and said perhaps it was not four-thirty yet.

Just then a motor sounded outside, and a deep voice could be heard
giving directions to a chauffeur.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane—to forget the De Burgho was to receive a glance
which Darby said struck you like a horse’s kick—was immeasurably large,
and covered with a great deal of drapery, which made the largeness a
mystery.  Her coats or mantles, generally edged with beads, floated
about her; her veils obliterated the outline of her neck; when skirts
were hobbled, she had covered them with dust-coats, and her evening
dresses were generally flowing.  From this haze of dark-hued costume
appeared a commanding countenance, high-nosed and keen-eyed, and framed
by a toupée which advertised itself as one, without guile.

She wrapped Mrs. Freyne in her large arms, and looked round for Gheena,
who had disappeared out the window.

"When she’s busy with a tea-cup, she can’t kiss you. I’m going until
then," said Gheena from somewhere outside, to Darby.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane was a pessimist who regretted everything.  Her
glances towards the sea seemed to search it for the flotilla of the
invaders which she knew must come; she said no precautions were being
taken, they were left open-coasted and alone.

"To hear her talk," said Darby in the corner, "one would say the whole
British Fleet ought to patrol the coast of Dunkillen."

"We are not taking it to heart," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane as she
floated ponderously to rest.  "No one seems to mind.  Economy is not
being borne in upon the nation.  Mrs. Harrison’s cakes, when I called
there, were just as rich as before August."

Darby looked thoughtfully at the array which the old butler was just
putting on the tea-table; there were five, and Anne was rather proud of
them all.  They had done lightsome with her, she had told the
kitchen-maid.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane’s glance passed from the cakes to the butler, and
she grew fiercely red, ejaculating "Naylour!" angrily.

The butler replied, "Good evening, Ma’am," politely, but nervously.

"Hot cakes?  Oh, thank you, Matilda; I should hate to grow stout, but as
I walked to the garden to-day I may venture.  And good evening, Gheena
dear!  How nicely browned you are, even so late in the year!"

With the faint nervousness with which everyone addressed Mrs. Keane,
Gheena touched her cheeks, and said it was bathing all summer.

"The news," said Mrs. Keane ponderously, "is bad. It is always bad.  Why
do we not sweep Belgium clear? Why?"

Darby, whose eye she caught, replied that he couldn’t say, and offered a
sultana cake humbly.

"Why not give it back to them instead of bringing the poor things over
here?" said Mrs. De Burgho Keane gloomily.  "So expensive, too!  I am
taking three gardeners, and I am told they have never even learnt
English.  One can hardly imagine it nowadays.  I am looking things in
the face," she went on emphatically. "It’s no use putting futurity
behind your back and hoping it will stay there."

Darby put down his tea-cup and rubbed his head softly.

"So I make it keep itself in the future where it should be.  I had all
the servants up and I’ve put my foot on their many eggs firmly, and
stopped their jam on Fridays, and weeded out those——"

"Those who could go to the war?" flashed Gheena, the patriot, ceasing to
be nervous.  "Hanly, of course?"

"Your tea is always so good," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane, ignoring
Gheena.  "Thank you, Matilda.  Do you weigh it out daily?  I told old
Naylour he would have to do without James, the pantry boy, and do
Eustace’s valeting as well, as Carty had enlisted; and when he said it
was too much for him, I made James butler.  I saw old Naylour here,"
added the lady haughtily.

"He was too old to go to strangers, and we thought we could do with
him," said Gheena quietly.

"You remember I asked you, Dearest George," put in Mrs. Freyne, an
anxious eye on her visitor.  "I asked you twice, and you—what are you
saying, Dearest, now?"

Dearest was saying "Damn!" a little too audibly, and looking at the
door.

"Yes, Dearest George said that he was quite tired of carving," said Mrs.
Freyne, "and Naylour is splendid at it.  George had just upset some
gravy on his lap the evening I asked him, and I think that helped him to
decide.  Crabbit will snuffle just when Dearest George is getting to the
jointy part of the ducks, and it’s so upsetting; very like an earthquake
or a serious illness under the table."

"It was I who took him," said Gheena briefly.  "He is a dear."

"Then I sent away the cook; she was quite old, too," said Mrs. De Burgho
Keane, forgetting Naylour gracefully, "and the present one only needs a
scullery maid, and I’ve put down one housemaid; and told the gardener he
must do without old Magee, he only pottered lately.  I have thoroughly
faced futurity," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane; "even my cakes are only
caraway seeds now."

"If they didn’t get stuck in one’s teeth," said Darby absently, "they
make you think of Kümmel, and that’s pleasant.  Crabbit, you’ve had
three pieces of sultana cake."

Crabbit laid a witchingly innocent head on Darby’s knee, his big liquid
eyes looking up sweetly.

"And I got rid of two of Eliza’s dogs," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane
pleasantly—"those two useless terrier brutes, with a touch of spaniel in
them, Gheena."

"Eliza’s dogs, what she loved!" Gheena was on her feet, her eyes
flaming.  "The dogs!  You—you——"

"I told the men to do it," said Mrs. De Burgho Keane placidly, "in the
lake—quite humanely."

What Gheena might have said was checked by a whisper from the old
butler.

"They are both below at me house," he breathed over the tea-cups.
"Little Miss Lizzie ’d break the heart in her, the craythur, over them."

Gheena’s flush faded slowly.  Mrs. Keane was just asking Darby if he did
not think of doing something out there.  Drive a car even, he could do
that.

"I should be more in the way than a help," said Darby after a pause.  He
seemed to find it hard to answer. "There will be enough cripples going
home without a ready-made one going out," he added with a twisted smile.

"What do you think Evangeline De Burgho Keane was born into the world
for?" Gheena asked fiercely, watching the lady go towards the garden,
from which she would return followed by a youth bearing a bundle of
cuttings and plants, and possibly fruit.

"To make us see how nice other people are," said Darby equally.  "Keefe,
she’s calling you now, she’s turned back."

Mr. Keefe emerged from behind a newly-lighted pipe to answer humbly.

"I do trust you are looking after your part of it, Mr. Keefe, and not
allowing the police to do nothing on bicycles all over the country when
there’s a war in Europe. Their place should be on the cliffs watching
for spies and submarines."

"I’ve applied for a commission," said Keefe briefly and irrelevantly,
"and the coastguards are trebled.  These are on the look-out for men on
Leeshane and Innisfail, and there is the patrol boat.  My part’s inland,
Mrs. De Burgho Keane, until I get out to fight."

Mrs. Keane—his tone offended her—said that she feared Mrs. Weston would
miss him; but no doubt when they took him off to learn drill they would
send some old and experienced man to a place of importance.

"It’s like slipping down a cliff covered with furze bushes," said Darby,
"everything raking you the wrong way, painfully.  Gheena, come and see
the horses.  Cheer up, Keefe."

He began to move so easily that he looked at his twisted limb, and a
thrill of hope moved him.  Would it ever regain some strength—allow him
even to walk without the crutch he detested?  He let it—the leg—drag and
saw its inert helplessness, and still thought it did not drag so much or
fall so uselessly.

The fine day was passing to a chill evening; the sea looked as though
all the gun metal of the world had been ground fine and spread over its
heavy waters.  It gleamed metallically, caught here and there by rays
from a sun half hidden by storm clouds.  Autumn turned to sterner mood,
weary of flawless skies and brilliant sunshine.

The yard at Castle Freyne was a huge place, sunny and sheltered, with
rows of stables sunk darkly into its walls.  They were roomy places,
with square holes in the ceiling to drop hay and straw through; cold in
winter, but horses throve hardily in them, if satin coats were unknown.
Gheena had established innovations, such as the removal of hay-racks,
water supplied constantly, and oat-crushers—all things which caused the
fat old coachman to say loftily that her Dada’s hunthers and his
father’s before him, God rest their sowls! wint out with none of that
nonsinse, and follyed the dogs as good as thim Miss Gheena worrited
over.

Hanly was nearly seventy, and Hanly’s father, who was ninety-four, and
absorbed sunshine and firelight according to the seasons nearly all day,
seated smoking in an arm-chair, could remember when hunting was hunting.

"’Twasn’t at airly dinner-hour ye’d be at the meet, but out at six
o’clock till ’twas too dark thin, an’ so on up till nine, an’ none of
ye’re trapsin’ here an’ trapsin’ there; but wouldn’t one good breedy fox
often run till they had their stomachs full of it, an’ they’d kill him
an’ be home by twelve or one, an’ in to a fine honest male of pounds of
beef and geese and turkeys an’ lashens of drink."

Old Mat could not be shaken by any tales of improved breeding of
fox-hounds.

"Don’t you go out to hunt and not to race?" he would pipe.  "An’ how can
ye be watchin’ hounds if ivery moment ye think ye’re horse ’ll give out
an’ ye be left behind?"

There was no wire those days, according to Mat, and no claims for fowl
eaten by foxes, and no doing up of horses when be rights the big house
should be shut for the night.

"A gran’ dinner at five an’ the shutters shut, an’ a bed to sleep in
that wasn’t all twisted iron, full of air-holes, but close and cosy,
with curtains around ye."

Matty could pipe out tales of great hunts in those bygone days—hunts
lasting for three or four hours after one fox—and tell of Sergeant, the
great black weight-carrier, and of Napoleon and Molly, his own two.

Gheena had three horses of her own—two active compact six-year-olds,
just the stamp to gallop as well as scramble, and known as Whitebird and
Redbird, and a leggy roan mare, which she had purchased herself in the
spring, and which she was not at all sure about, called Bluebird.

Dearest George’s horses, paid for by his wife, were large and sedate and
extremely valuable.  A stout strong cob, with legs of iron, carried
Matilda in the very hilly country, and a showy whistling bay on other
days.

"I brought over that bay to-day," said Keefe, after he had given the
unstinted praise due to other people’s horses, and yawned twice outside
the boxes; there was nothing to be bought here.  "The one I wanted for
Mrs. Weston.  It had a cold when the remount man was round."

"I knew it was Slattery’s," said Darby.

Mr. Keefe grunted irritably.

"I’ve got it here anyhow," he said.  "And I told her I would have, so I
hoped she’d come over to see it this afternoon quietly.  It’s standing
in that box."

"Pull it out, Phil," commanded Darby; "Mr. Keefe’s bay."

Phil pulled out a narrow, very tall bay with black legs and a
well-set-on tail, but showing old marks of brushing in front; it had
slightly contracted feet and a whistler’s jowl.  Notwithstanding these
faults, the bay could gallop and jump when he was fresh, but two hours’
work saw the end of him; and, tired, he clicked his shoes forging,
brushed, and stumbled on the roads, and if asked to go on fencing,
finished that up by a variety of crumbling falls. Fattened up, he was
taking and showy.

"Of all the—I knew him well," said Darby, just as Mrs. Weston tottered
through the archway.

"Naylour told me you were all here," she said, "except Mrs De Burgho
Keane, whom he didn’t seem to count. So I just came along, sans
something, as they say in France, don’t they?  Mr. Keefe said he would
have the hunter horse here for me to see."

Mrs Weston was pleasantly fresh in a bright mauve tam-o’-shanter, a
white dress, and shoes to match her hat.

"He’s just out on view," said Darby; "and don’t slip get just behind him
or you might lose him and think him was a clothes-line."

Mrs. Weston stepped forward, gave a quick bird-like glance, and began:
"Of all the——"  Then she stopped suddenly and looked again.

"He is a very nice horse, isn’t he?" she said brightly.

"There isn’t gap in the country you couldn’t slip through on that
fellow," remarked Darby, ignoring Keefe’s furious eyes.  "And you ought
to keep him always tail foremost, Mrs. Weston; his is so pretty."

Violet Weston thought it was a love of a tail, very happily.  He was not
at all like the horses they rode in Australia, she added, much
finer-looking; and she thought he might be very nice to run after hounds
on.

"Slattery did it often," said Darby tersely to himself and hobbling off.

Keefe, relieved by his absence, now explained the difficulty of getting
any horses just at present.  People who had very good hunters hid them
away for fear they would be commandeered, and all the sixty and
seventy-pound screws were sold.

"The most lamentable sight ever I seen," observed Phil, taking the bay
for a little stroll down the yard and back again.  "The teeth dhragged
out of the youngsters to make them the right age, an’ ould sthagers
taken that ye’d offered oats to feed ’em on it, sthone blind I seen them
bought, an’ sore with spavins, an’ broken-winded.  Old car horses ripped
out of the shafts an’ soult for chargers. Runaways, stoopers,
sthaggerers, the sorra a charnst a man would have to run away at all
with the craythurs sint out for them," concluded Phil sorrowfully.

"He—has his—forelegs a little near together, hasn’t he?" inquired Violet
Weston dubiously.

"The way he can’t throw dust up betune them," said Phil softly,
something very like a wink trembling on his left eyelid.

Mrs. Weston held up a mauve suede shoe to Phil; next moment she was in
the saddle, with a white skirt very much rucked up, and a good deal of
mauve silk stockings to be seen.  She trotted the bay horse out of the
gate and put him into a gallop in the field outside.

When everyone had rushed out to see her fall off, they saw that she was
quite at home in a man’s saddle, and if she did not ride over well, yet
knew how to stay on.

Returning with the bay all out, Mrs. Weston had only just time to avoid
Mrs. De Burgho Keane, who fled aside with a scream and then halted to
stare icily at the mauve legs.

"I couldn’t hold on sideways," said Violet Weston apologetically; "and,
of course, I’d wear boots.  He won’t be very dear, will he, Mr. Keefe,
because I want a new fur coat as well?"

Mr. Keefe said sixty pounds with a faint quiver in his voice.  "And a
dozen of gloves for luck," he said gallantly.

"I’d rather have a bridle," said Mrs. Weston pleasantly. "And there is
only a kind of shed which Tom Guinane says he must put a door to; but I
expect the horse will do nicely."

The old saw of Romford’s, "I’m too much of a gentleman," rang in Keefe’s
head.

"If we really are going to have hunting, and you say horses are so hard
to find," went on Mrs. Weston pleasantly.

Keefe thought ruefully of the string of horses which would be trotted
towards the front gate of Seaview directly Violet Weston made her
intention of hunting known. Prompt decision would alone save him from
loss on his gamble, for he had bought the narrow bay.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane looking on, now declared that if, as her husband
informed her, foxes must be killed, they ought to be shot, and not make
the country a laughing stock by running about after the Caseys’ foot
pack. The earths could be closed and the animals dislodged with terriers
and good shots stationed.  "Now you are able to shoot still, Darby?"

Darby said "Yes," with the same twisted smile.

"And the foxes killed, the skins could be sold for the Blue Cross Fund,"
said the lady decidedly.

She held the public ear as she put forward the absolute wickedness of
spending money upon hunters when every penny was, and would be, wanted
for the war.

"If everyone gave up keeping everything, it seems to me that a lot of
people would starve," said Darby gravely. "Out-of-place servants who
cannot join the army are rather at a discount this year.  If we all did
nothing always, we should make a lot of riches and create a lot of
poverty."

"If you are sure she will get over the fences," said Violet Weston, "I
will buy him.  And can I call it Britannia or Commander-in-Chief?"

Darby mildly suggested Equator, because it was a line, and was coldly
turned away from.

Harold Keefe drew a breath of sheer relief.

"I’ll have the cob with the curbs for myself now," he thought
blissfully, "out of the profit."

"You are going to take it without a vet.?" said Gheena. "Are you?  You
warrant it, Mr. Keefe?"

Mr. Keefe’s pained expression rested on the Commander-in-Chief’s hocks,
and he said warmly that he’d warrant it fit to hunt, for it never went
lame on them.

"Oh, leave it between them, Gheena," murmured Darby wearily.  "They can
put it in the settlements."

Mr. Keefe, with an outburst of unwilling honesty, now drew gloomy
attention to the curb.

"He has a curb," he said darkly.  "It never stopped him."

"But—I thought it was a very severe bridle," said the widow vaguely,
"and was two bits; and it is only wearing one at present."

"If it was a gag on his hocks it would do her," gulped Darby, when he
had recovered a little and emerged from the stable he had fled into.
"He wears his curb behind, Mrs. Weston, not in his mouth."

Mrs. Weston said, "What absolute nonsense!" quite huffily and patted the
Commander’s white nose.

"I hate a horse with a white nose, he always looks like a sheep," said
Darby.  "And, hello, Mrs. Delaney! How many hens has the fox eaten now?"

A little withered old woman had come into the yard, a basket in her
hands.

"It is not hens I am afther, Masther Darby, but the lind of a handful of
flour from Anne to save me walkin’ onto the village, the Guinanes being
quite run out."

But they were taking it home last night from the ship, said Gheena
quickly.

"They didn’t brin’ it to the shop, then, Miss Gheena, an they up an’
toult me they could not have it until to-morrow."

Gheena nodded carelessly.

In a flutter of dark draperies Mrs. De Burgho Keane moved to her
motor-car, a luxurious Limousine.

"And you must be particular with Naylour, Matilda dear," she said.  "I
noticed that to-day, after years of impressing Madam upon him he had
fallen back upon Ma’am.  You will find him a difficult old creature,"
she added acidly, for just then she recalled the paucity of Naylour’s
wages and his great use in the house.

A malignant eye peering from behind the kitchen door revealed that old
Naylour was listening.

The big car lolloped off heavily, and the butler advanced into the yard;
Mrs. Freyne had gone in.

"I wondther who’ll juggle the decanthers of port-wine now for her," he
said bitterly.  "Fine red sthuff from Macdinough’s for the ladies an’
the clergy, and the cellar wine for themselves an’ th’ experts.  An’
champagne the same way, with me heart broke in me, huntin’ Jamesey for
fear he’d make a mistake.  An’ in she’d wheel directly the dinner was
over an’ the gentlemin cleared out, makin measure in her heart’s eye on
the decanthers befour she’d lock them up.  The gentleman had no maneness
in him, poor gentleman, but herself.  God save us!"

"I don’t know why she ever comes here," said Gheena pettishly.  "Isn’t
she horrid, Mr. Keefe?"

"She has the face of a fat rat on her," said Keefe briefly.

                              *CHAPTER V*

"How the dickens did your Dada call them up?" said Darby, eyeing the ten
couple of fox-hounds’ relations as they rushed joyously round his park,
declining to come near anyone.

"He had a nise of his own," said Andy cautiously, "and his bugle.  Maybe
if ye sounded ye’res, yer honor."

Heads were thrown up at the note, to go down again, apparently regarding
the sound as something of no moment to them.

"Me Dada’s bugle had a grating screech on it," said Andy.  "Grandjer!
Grandjer!  Grandjer is after a rabbit.  Beauty, ye spalpeen!  Beauty
agragh?"

The crooked-legged old matron came to the call, wagging her long tan
stern abjectly.

Darby said cheerily that it was a good thing to have one obedient.  He
watched Gheena galloping her grey recklessly as she endeavoured to put
hounds back to him.

"D’ye hear that!  Isn’t Grandjer terrible swhift?" Andy’s admiring note
was called for by the dying scream of the rabbit as Grandjer broke it up
and ate it.

"What I intended to do," said Darby, lifting his hat to cool his head,
"was to take these brutes round by Leshaun and back the mountain road.
It is not a bit of use taking them out if they won’t follow us anywhere.
Good man, Phil!"

An accurately aimed lash was driving Spinster and Doatie out of the
woods.

A little more noise and violent whip-work brought the whole of the pack
into view; they sat down, greeted each other as complete friends, but
looked with distrust at Darby on his black mare.  Their master had
always been on foot.

"If ye were to borry me Dada’s bugle," said Andy hopefully.  "It is
hangin’ up at home."

"Chance the road, Phil," said Darby.  "We must get to Cullane on Monday
somehow."

Darby’s old house stood well back from the sea, a long, rambling house,
which had been pulled down by someone who objected to its original
hideousness, and rebuilt with gables and wide windows.  A flagged
terrace, guarded with stone railings and stone urns, which in summer
overflowed with scarlet geraniums, had been laid out at one side; and
the usual basement, where the kitchen blinked up behind a dark alley,
was made darker still by another railing of cut stone.  The inevitable
fuchsia hedges guarded the flower-beds, a tangle now of withering
dahlias and Michaelmas daisies.

A fine old place, well kept up, and no one alive knew what battles the
young owner had fought with himself there when he came back to it
crippled.  Battles fought for endurance, when the joys of being up again
and able to shuffle in the sunshine had worn off.  The very trees which
he used to climb, the sunk fences which he jumped so lightly over, the
ladders leading to the lofts, mocked Darby.

To get down to the trout stream meant a long weary struggle, or the
bitterness of sitting in his bath-chair drawn by old Ned the donkey.

When hope of amending culminated in being able to ride, Darby knew that
his days of swift life were done for ever.  He snatched something from
the wreck; he could shuffle on his crutch.  He could shoot as straight
as ever, fish from a boat or where the banks were flat.

When he ceased to rebel, he knitted up as many ravelled strands as he
could, and twisted and crippled, faced his lease of life.

England called now; he could not go to her, not back to his old regiment
which was fighting somewhere in France.  Riding at Darby’s right side,
he looked straight and whole, a lean, good-looking man, with a kindly
ravaged face.  Coming to the other, one saw an arm tied up, a leg
palpably cork, stiff and useless, an almost useless hand, and a scar,
vanishing now, on the cheek-bone.

He could ride still, and shuffle back to the saddle without much
difficulty after a fall, easy things to meet with in the close country,
with its trappy fences and its occasional big bog drains or awkward
pieces of gaps fenced by stabs of bog dale.

Black Maria sidled and snorted at the pack, which trolled along
obediently enough now, believing they must really be going out hunting.
Stafford said he would come to help and get them to know him.  And Mr.
Keefe could not come because they wanted him somewhere.

"They seem to want everyone somewhere now," said Gheena gloomily.
"There are the Guinanes out fishing, and it’s horribly rough."

The Guinanes’ boat was bobbing actively on the back of vicious leaden
waves, bobbing down almost out of sight, and the two men had their backs
in it as they pulled.

"Just by Shanockheela, where there’s that nasty current—they can’t catch
anything to-day."

"They have a new boat got for sailing," commented Andy.  "An’ me Mama
does be thinkin’ Mrs. Weston gave it to them, for they couldn’t have the
money nor half of it themselves."

"It is McGreery’s boat that he left an’ he to list," put in Phil;
"thirty pound they should pay.  She is above at the Quay now."

"They seem to be rowing out," said Darby, staring, "and there’s a real
big sea at the point.  Oh, it’s to meet that fishing-smack that’s
standing in."

They stood watching the dipping and rising of the little boat, and the
pitching of the red-sailed smack, which beat in against the wind,
lurching past the rowing boat.

"They’ve had enough," said Gheena; "they’re putting the lines in.  Good
gracious! they’ll be swamped."

The sea out there for a small boat was cruelly wild, but the men put up
a rag of sail and ran down to the coast before the strong wind into the
shelter of the harbour.

"There is some clather behind us," said Andy, pulling up Ratty just as
Darby commented upon the bravery of fishermen.  "A sight of horses, I’m
thinkin’."

There were four, all ridden at a break-neck trot, with Mrs. Weston’s
Commander-in-Chief, very fresh and jaunty, leading the procession.

She wore a multitude of curls showing round the edge of her bowler hat,
which curls, she confided to Gheena, she simply could not tuck away, and
she looked fresh and young as she rode loose-reined, with the sea breeze
blowing off her powder.

"For two miles," gasped George Freyne, "I’ve talked about tendons, and
she went faster and faster."

"But if I hadn’t gone so very fast, I’d simply have had to go rather
fast for longer," said Mrs. Weston equably. "You were so late coming for
me."

"The cutting of drains," said Basil gravely, "and the guarding of
coasts.  Freyne here is worn out at Home Defence, and even I had to take
messages to-day right round to Clona Kratty."

"I’ll be giving you all orders soon," said Keefe, mopping his pink face.
"As we’re all friends here.  They may come and invade us."  This deep
note of tragedy in his voice caused the two boys to say, "Laws Almighty,
d’ye say so, the haythens!" and Gheena to clutch so nervously at the
grey’s mouth that he reared in astonishment.

"In Heaven’s name, Keefe," said George Freyne, "when are we to go to
sleep in safety?"

"That’s what they’ll tell you," breathed Mr. Keefe mysteriously.  "When
they come."

"One would think you’d been talking to them," said Gheena suspiciously.
"And as we have no guns and no troops, I don’t see why they shouldn’t."

"If we drive to the very top of the hills," said Violet Weston,
hopefully hysterical, "and built eyries there, they’re dreadfully
short-winded and might never bother to run up after us."

"You wait until they shelled you," said Darby, "in your eyrie.  Gheena
looks as though she contemplated entrenching on the lawn."

"Are they beyant in the little boat?" piped Andy dolorously.  "Are they,
Mr. Keefe, was thim Germins?"

"Who told you, Keefe?"  George Freyne showed symptoms of acute strain.
"Who—is it right?  Are they coming?  Are they?"

"Don’t get so enated," said Keefe calmly, "I can’t tell you now.  When
they come, you know.  What are you talking about, Dillon?  It won’t be
any use when you’re crucified bodies!  Don’t be absurd!"  Staring at a
ring of white faces and hands dropped limply on their horses’ necks, Mr.
Keefe grew irritable.  "When the orders come," he said sharply, "they’ll
be really nearly a reality."

"To have lost all that fright for nothing," said Darby tersely.
"Orders!"

"Then why in the name of Goodness did you say it was Germans?" blared
Freyne furiously; "considering I have got a weak heart.  You did say the
Germans were coming.  I say you did, sir."

"As plainly as the hills," said Mrs. Weston reproachfully. "Oh, what a
fright!"

"Unless they showed playing Wagner on the road, it could not have been
plainer," said Gheena huffily, "making us all fuss like that, and trying
to look as if we weren’t, and Phil——"

"Phil appears to have gone home to tell your mother," said George
Freyne, answering.

"She won’t mind a bit until you come to advise her about it, so that
doesn’t matter," returned Gheena. "Yes, he’s gone."

"He said he was off to the Missus," said Andy, "an’ ye none of ye heard
him go."

"Three times I repeated: When my _orders_ come!" wailed Keefe.  "And I
should not have said even that, but I was just trying to break it easily
to you all that there will be orders as to invasion, if there is an
invasion; and when they come..."

"If you say it again, Keefe, I shall set Grandjer at your horse," said
Darby loftily.

Mr. Freyne then got off his horse, and suggested learning the hounds’
names, which they had come out for instead of talking nonsense.  Andy
knew them all.  But, as in a kaleidoscope, tan and pied bodies and
flapping ears and wistful eyes seemed to shift and melt before the
would-be learner.

"That is Doatie, with the sphot above his tail.  Call him.  That is
Sergeant ye called, an’ his biggest sphot is on his eye."

"Didn’t you call the first one a he," said Freyne heatedly, "and that
other—and both?"

"Well, he—Doatie—do have pups surely," said Andy patiently; "but he has
a sphot on his tail annyways, an’ that is Sergeant."

Grandjer, yellow tan and tailless, was unmistakable. So was Sweetheart,
who had lost an ear, and the enormous Home Ruler.  The two small black
hounds called respectively the Divil and the Tailor could only be
mistaken for each other.  They were, Andy told them, "Holy terrors to
hunt, but apt to be yowlin’ if a fence was very high, bein’ baygles
entirely."

The pack sat or rolled, greatly interested in the increasing reiteration
of its names.

Beauty, being polite, thumped her tail without pause; it was really
hardly worth while stopping.  All the more obliging hounds shifted and
oozed from side to side as they were called, and the lesson terminated
at length by Darby suggesting that dinner-time would be upon them and
they had better go on.

It was too late to wander into the mountains.  Darby took a road which
wound up to a little group of houses, and then back again to the coast,
with the pack lumbering along quite placidly and the four whippers-in
all repeating names behind them.

All save Gheena.  Sundry visits to the meets of the foot dogs had made
her familiar with most of the pack.

The Commander-in-Chief, somewhat exhausted by his burst, was now forging
noisily, clicking his flat feet together fiercely, and varying this by
an occasional stumble.

"Did you really think Mr. Keefe meant the Germans were coming?"  Gheena
found Basil Stafford riding beside her.

"And if he had meant it," he said, with a thrill in his voice.  "It’s a
big sea to guard, Miss Freyne.  Lord, if he had meant it!  Spiked
helmets marching along this road—oh, with their owners, if you like it,
and everything seized!  Promise me if they ever do come you’ll run away
inland," he said.  "They won’t go off the railway lines."

"How could they come?"  Gheena looked out to sea. "You don’t think they
mean to try?"

"I know"—he checked himself—"I know—that it may be possible for them to
try."

"I shall ride away Whitebird and lead Redbird, and lead Bluebird, and
take all the dogs," said Gheena firmly.

Save for the chasing of a blameless cat, the pack got home in chastened
mood, greatly depressed by an aimless promenade.  George Freyne’s car
was at Darby’s gate, and a suggestion of bed at Castle Freyne was well
received.

"Keefe can lead Gheena’s horse, he won’t want to hurry, and Stafford can
take mine, Darby, and we’ll drive. Matilda may have been worried by Phil
about Keefe’s nonsense."

A tyre bursting delayed the motor, and the horses could cross a short
way through the park, so that as they drove up the avenue they saw
Stafford appearing with Gheena’s grey jogging amicably beside him.

"Hello, there!  Hello, you!  I say, Freyne!" he called out, amazed to
see the motor swerve.

"Dearest, the sunk fence!" shrilled Gheena.

For the car was suddenly left to itself as Dearest George cleared
something from his face, and again, with light-hearted gaiety, the
Sunbeam immediately dived off the gravel at the sunk fence.

"Hello, I say!" Gheena leaped from the car wildly.

"A bee," said Freyne, beating at the air hard, "a bee! Bees, my God!"

He switched the power off and leaped for the shelter of the laurels.

"He’s mad," said Gheena.  "But it is bees!  All the bees!"  Her dive
into the undergrowth was even swifter than her stepfather’s.  She was
followed by Darby going with long bounds off his crutch, and then by the
chauffeur.  A swarm of furious insects buzzed outside.

"Bees!"  George Freyne wiped his forehead.  "The bees have risen.  I am
badly stung on my nose."

"They’ve swarmed on the doorstep," suggested Gheena. "Look! they are in
a cloud.  I thought you were crazy at first, Dearest, but you’re right.
And the car has not gone over."

"Bees," said Darby, "don’t swarm in October."

"The two hives is beyant on the steps," remarked Dayly the chauffeur, as
he nursed a stung cheek drearily. "I sees them."

Basil Stafford, skirting the sunk fence, believed that they had all gone
away and called out loudly.  His fevered imagination even sprung to the
chance of Germans having really come and being in full occupation of
Castle Freyne.

"Hello—what!"  He struck an insect from his nose. The bees saw new
worlds to conquer.  He beat his ears. It is lamentable to add that young
England’s manhood sprang yelling from the saddle, leaped the sunk fence,
and was into the laurels on to Dearest George’s body.

"Bees!" howled Stafford.  "Swarms!"

"In October," wailed Freyne, dabbing his swelling nose and nursing a
trampled-on leg.

"And both the horses have gone off their heads," said Gheena.  "They
have simply flown away.  You will go at once to catch them, Dayly."

"I would be afeard, Miss," said the chauffeur simply. "They are terrible
sot agin horses any times, them bays."

At this point the dining-room window was opened very cautiously.

"The first of them," quavered Phil’s voice dramatically, "It was thruth.
They are lurkin’ in the bushes.  I hears them."

Gheena said, "Listen."

Then there was a pause in conversation filled by prayer.

"It is the Masther’s cyar," declaimed Anne the cook. "I’d know her in
Heaven."

"They took her off him," gulped Mary Kate, the kitchenmaid, who was in
the throes of Ave Marias.  "He is kilt, the craythur.  See the empty
sate."

"An’ there is some lurking outside," breathed Phil. "I can hear them in
the shrubs.  I tell ye wasn’t it the great plan entirely to kape us
safe?  The poor ould Masther, the craythur."

His master’s head, veiled by a flapping laurel leaf, suddenly issued
from the thicket, and the voice which issued from behind it did not seem
to be discussing Germans.

"God above us, did they do ye a harrum, sir?" wailed Anne from the
window, putting out her kindly face for a second.  "An’ ye too, Bayly?
God be praised for ye’re lives."

"The two eyes out of me head," replied Dayly—Dearest was incoherent—"and
the Masther’s nose the size of two, an’ Misther Stafford picked in the
ear."

"The haythens!" said the voice, now again behind the blind.  "The Turks
an’ infidels.  I hear Dayly.  Could the polis——"  She prayed loudly.

"Prayer won’t mind ye, Mary Kate," counselled Phil, sobbing.  "I hear
Miss Gheena bawlin’."

At this point Gheena grew hysterical.  George Freyne’s words became
clear as he ordered Phil, as a something, something, something idiot, to
get away the bees, to get help and take the dam brutes away.

The angry bees were racing up and down the avenue between the laurels
and safety.

"I carried them around," said Phil soberly, out of the window, "thinkin’
they’d destroy the robbers if they comes up, so I up and clapped the two
carriage rugs around them, an’ they neshtin’ within, an’ I wouldn’t say
we can ever get them back till it is dark entirely, sir, they bein’ a
trifle irritated in themselves an’ all out."

The prospect of crouching in the laurels until after dark, or the
alternative of squeezing through the barbed wire palings or of taking
the open surrounded by a cloud of bees was now with the refugees.

The remarks which sped from the bitter smelling shade of the laurels
were venomous as the disturbed honey-makers.

"Someone is talkin’," said the sober voice behind the Venetian blind.
"Howld ye’re whist, Mary Anne, till we listen.  Would ye dhraw the
Germins on us?  Do not stir the blind on ye’re life or they’ll be in.
The bees Mary Anne, not the——"

At this point Mrs. Freyne opened the hall door.  It was dim behind her,
and she was not perceived by the questing enemy.

"Matilda," wailed her husband, "get them away!"

"Oh, you, Dearest!" replied his wife placidly.  "Dear me!  I see the car
nearly over the sunk fence, and I thought I heard George, but I cannot
do anything until he comes—can I, Professor?—about the Germans."

A deeper note grunted from the hall.  Mrs. Freyne chased a bee from her
face.

"Matilda," yelped George Freyne, "send someone!"

"There are no Germans, only bees," called Dayly loudly.  "An’ we are all
picked and bit sorryful, Ma’am."

"Bees!"  Mrs. Freyne saw the hives.  "Professor, someone has put two
hives at the door, and Dearest George is in the bushes.  Dearest, what
am I to do?"

George put forth a swollen face to deliver orders, to cry for men and
bee dresses.  To pray that veiled rescuers should be sent to them and
gauze veils—anything to escape the bees.

Mrs. Freyne, obliged to ask advice, hurried to the Professor.  A stifled
yell and a crash told that the enemy had gone inside, and the hall door
was slammed, promises of aid being presently shrilled from the upper
windows.

"We are getting transparent things, Dearest.  You are sure there is no
danger?  My net skirt, do you think? Oh, dear!"

The enraged bees sighted new worlds to conquer as they sped out at
Violet Weston and Mr. Keefe, who were riding quietly across the lawn,
the result being—four gaitered legs described some circles and curves,
and two people dived wildly from their saddles and ran.

"If you ask Dearest George what to do," advised Mrs. Freyne from the
upper window—"he is under the laurels—he’ll tell you."

Mrs. Weston crashed to covert with a shriek, followed by Mr. Keefe
swearing fluently, and plucking bees from his collar; these he stamped
on, but they had stung him first.

A variety of advising onlookers began to collect cautiously on the
avenue, all advising at the same time.

Dayly suddenly put his coat over his head and sped blindly to
comparative safety.

"An’ I thinkin’ it the grandest plan," said Phil, speaking now from the
bushes at the other side of the drive. "Bullets they is used to, says I,
an’ they might resint; but innocent bees, they could blame none for,
says I, an’ the two maids bawlin’ and prayin’ within."

"There is James runnin’, afther they have him kilt," wailed the
housemaid wildly.  "Oh, the Turks!  An’ the Missus cool an’ aisy at the
windy above."  Another wild shriek echoed despairingly, followed by sobs
for mercy, and Mary Kate hid her face.

Now just as James took flight, Mrs. De Burgho Keane’s large car hummed
to the gate, and was pulled sharply up to avoid Dayly.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane was pinched and anxious looking. Phil had dropped
word as he scurried for home.

The sight of the flying figure, the murmurs from the bushes, upset her
completely.

Even as Dayly escaped, Smith, her own chauffeur, suddenly let the car
slap into the bushes as he beat frantically at the air.  Mrs. De Burgho
Keane suggested "Mines!" at the pitch of her voice, reasoning out that
some hidden force must have upset the discreet Englishman. Muffled
figures rushed across the drive.

"If they would take five pounds and the ham to let me go," she pattered
unevenly, searching in her purse. And she got half out of the car as
Dearest George, his head muffled in an old net skirt of his wife’s, came
tearing blindly out of the laurels, flapping at a cloud of bees.  They
were in the net, entangled, these furious little beings of wrath tinged
and buzzed in his ears.  He struck the car, and with a sob clutched
Smith the chauffeur, burrowing down under the wheel for covert.

"My God! they are after you!" said Mrs. Keane heavily.  "They have hurt
you!  Oh, the horror—of reality!"

The amazing spectacle of George Freyne veiled in net thrilled her with
horror.

"Half killed me, the devils!  Start the car, Smith; back her!  Get her
away!  Get us out of this!  Half killed me!  One eye gone, my nose
ruined!  Start her, will you?"

Smith jogged the self-starter, and put in the reverse with a yell.  He
had just been stung.  Mrs. De Burgho Keane on the avenue leaped for
safety as the maddened chauffeur passed her without heed.

"Put your long veil down," yelled George Freyne; "you’ll be all right if
you do."

A variety of muffled figures now issued from the bushes. Gheena entirely
covered by art-muslin curtains, Stafford with a butterfly net over his
head and the handle wagging behind, the rescuers insecurely draped, and
the gardener in a correct bee dress and armed with a syringe and a bell.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane had sat down flat on the avenue, and she was quite
close to a collapse.  Stafford stopped to help her.  She was clasping
her floating lace veil across her face and she endeavoured to speak with
a German accent.  She leant back against nothing and nearly
overbalanced.

Darby Dillon had driven his car over and had pulled up to watch in rare
amazement the flight of Dearest George; the spinning away of the
Limousine from its rightful owner, and her subsequent collapse.

Rocking helplessly at the wheel, he saw the Professor spin out
Dervish-wise into the open, with a black ninon skirt roped round his
neck and spreading out cape-wise over his shoulders.

"The party," said Stafford, from the butterfly net, "is now complete."
He wagged the handle at Darby.

"You are not going to lift it!" muttered Mrs. Keane heavily.  "Not going
to look at me!  I am really not so beautiful at all, Herr German.
Mines!  So quickly! They upset Smith—Schmidt, a name homelike to Boches.
I—if five pounds, and a ham—it’s all I’ve with me—to let me go."

Stafford’s laughter rent him for a time, then he said: "Oh, come along!"
quite kindly, and poked sufficiently behind the lacy shoulders to lift
her up.

"Mr. Stafford, how did you escape?"  The stout lady got up and stood
unsteadily.

"They won’t follow us into the house, but hurry," said Stafford,
choking.  "Hurry, while the gardener bells them."

For Carty, loftily secure in veil and gloves, commenced to peal the
bell.

Mrs. De Burgho Keane heard and gave up with a stifled cry of the Tocsin,
then slid into Stafford’s arm, her head on his shoulder, the Professor
supporting her the other side.  She was not quite unconscious, but
absolutely dazed, submitting without realizing it to the support of the
nearest wheelbarrow which was half full of weeds.  Darby drove swiftly
across the lawn to the yard gate, thus avoiding the bees.

When they had all assembled in the drawing-room, picked off the
remaining bees and stood uneasily, starting at every sound, Mrs. De
Burgho Keane woke up.  Someone had drenched her in toilet vinegar and
left her to recover.

Mrs. Freyne consulted Dearest George as to remedies for bee stings
before, a little hurt at his reply, she fetched the blue-bags and
onions, of which the room reeked healthily.

George Freyne had apparently lost one eye; the other glared from the
shelter of a swollen nose in an outraged frenzy of pain.  Stafford
rubbed his neck delicately and Gheena shook a finger regretfully.

Old Naylour, quite unshaken, had brought in comforting tea.

"Do you think, Dearest George, that tea would upset Mrs. Keane?" asked
Matilda Freyne thoughtfully.  "She is opening her eyes."  To which
George Freyne remarked unsympathletically that anyone was damn lucky who
had eyes to open, and Mrs. Keane sat up appalled by such callousness.

"They hurt you," she said faintly, "hurt you all.  I succumbed.  And
they?  They spared us.  I said Schmidt to placate them."

"They are nearly all in now," said Stafford, looking out.  "The bell did
it and the dark."

Mrs. Keane muttered something incoherently; the words related to the
Tocsin and the French.

"And the mines which upset Smith," she said.  "Poor Smith!  What an
experience!"

When the facts of the case and Phil’s strategy were fully explained to
her, Mrs. De Burgho Keane felt a sense of loss.  If they were not
Germans, then everyone had behaved as though they were—well, she sniffed
up the scent of onions.

"Bees alone," she said awfully, "do not cause men to rush and scream and
hurl themselves from dark corners and take my car, and my man Smith,
and——"

"He got it on the cheek and the hand," said Stafford gloomily.  "Some of
your half-dead ’uns, Freyne, in your bridal veil."

"The skirt which the cook did get me," said the Professor, "is torn
sorely, but it kept out much pain."

Mrs. Violet Weston, stung on the neck, said gruffly that it was all
absurd.  Mr. Keefe, whose cheeks were engaged in swallowing his snub
nose, decided that he would not be able to do duty anywhere for a week
or more.

A chorus of voices sounded outside advising and declaiming.  Presently
Mrs. De Burgho Keane, shaken and offended, made her way to her car
attended by her gloomy one-eyed host.

"And Phil"—she turned round—"what will you do to Phil, or what has been
done to him?"

George Freyne muttered the words, "Hang Phil!" viciously but
indistinctly.

To this day Mrs. De Burgho Keane believes that the truth was concealed
from her, and that an invading army of Germans are either buried in the
park or took sail again for Germany, finding Ireland useless to them.

"Bees!" she said haughtily to those whom she confided in, "the bees were
a blind for other excesses."

                              *CHAPTER VI*

"Wasn’t it all a great upset entirely, Miss Gheena," said Phil
sympathetically.  "Mary Kate isn’t the bether of it yet, an’ the
Masther’s lost eye blinks, an’ all."

Gheena remarked gravely that she thought the defence of Ireland ought to
be entrusted to Phil.

"Bein’ full sure themselves was comin’," continued Phil ruefully, "an’
the Missus alone in the Great House with that Professor that’s up to no
good.  Sure I thought it was the great thought, an’ when I heard the
nise in the bushes, I wasn’t full sure they was come on us, an’ I right
entirely to brin’ the bees out."

Darby burst into sudden laughter, memory of those thronged moments
reaching him.

"When Dearest went off backwards in the car, and she sat down," gulped
Darby, "and the Professor danced out in the black tea-gown tied over his
head."

"If ye had it dhrawn out on one of thim twiddly picthers, wouldn’t it be
the great sight?" said Phil.  "But when they were afther sayin’ the
Germans was comin’, was I right to believe them, Mister Darby?  Wouldn’t
it be the price of them haythens to be picked be honest bees? But the
Masther is that peevish about it," ruminated Phil, "an’ at me noon and
night.  If he was one of us afther a fair or a dance, he wouldn’t be
thinkin’ long of a closed eye."

Darby grinned again, and looked up to see Gheena cast off her coat and
stand in close-fitting stockingette.

"It is much too cold for a bathe," he said paternally.

Gheena kicked off her shoes, and remarked that cold water was always
warmer when it wasn’t really warm, as she poised for a dive.

The sea poured in just there into a deep narrow pool, hedged over about
twenty yards down by a narrow belt of rocks.  Beyond that was another
pool, a small one, and there the sea seemed to dive under a ledge,
called the Bridge, where it gurgled and sucked and muttered restlessly,
until it showed again in a basin of great depth, washed into at low tide
by the waves and covered at high.

Gheena poised, balanced, disappeared.  The water surged and parted,
throwing up protesting sprays and rippled as she shot up.  Then she was
gone again out of sight.

"Always she does be doin’ that same," said Phil, "undther the rock no
less, like a merrymaid."

Darby ran to the Bridge.  A shadow showed in the green depths swimming
easily under water; next moment Gheena’s merry face shot up.

"I call it my diving-bell."  She trod water easily.

"It’s hang dangerous going under like that; if there was a devil-fish
down there."

"Or a shark," suggested Gheena, holding on to the seaweed-hung ledge.

"There does be cobblers, anyways," put in Phil, "an’ I seen a lobsther
out of that hole onst."

"I say I call it my diving-bell," Gheena laughed. "I can get out to the
Basin now, Darby.  That took me ages.  I used to go half way and get
frightened.  And I’m waiting to find a way into the pool of Cons Cave;
there must be a passage, and it’s close to this."

"You go out to the Basin!"  Darby stood on the rocks, his face white and
drawn.  He could hobble, he could ride, but if Gheena choked down there