"That fellow's face would hang him anywhere," said Terry O'Gara. "I wonder what amount of villainy lies between a gamekeeper's place at Ashbridge and the brute he is to-day?"
"God help them that are in his power," Patsy Kenny said fervently. Then he went to the gate and looked out. The pots and pans and cans had disappeared. Down the long straight road there was no one in sight. The woman and child had vanished.
Oddly enough he was disturbed by the noise Mustapha was still making in his box-stall.
"I shouldn't be surprised now if he was to be a foal of Spitfire," he said. "I did hear she was bought by a man somewhere about Lewy mountain. The little man we bought him from was a mountainy man, if he wasn't a fairy."
The morning after these happenings Lady O'Gara, turning over the pile of letters on the breakfast table, changed colour at the sight of one which bore an Italian postmark. It was addressed in a large firm handwriting in which only very keen observation could have discovered any sign of weakening. After that momentary glance she laid away the letter with the superscription turned downwards while she read the rest of her correspondence.
When she had finished breakfast she followed her husband into his office, as that special room was called. The windows had not been opened--they were French windows and they served as a door out on to the gravel sweep which ran around the house--and she thought she detected a faint disagreeable smell, as of drugs. She unbolted a window and flung it wide and the warm June air came flowing in, banishing the unpleasant sharp odour.
"You haven't been taking anything, Shawn?" she asked, looking at him a little anxiously. "I thought I smelt something peculiar. You are not looking well."
"I am very well, Mary," he answered. "Perhaps it was the person I had here yesterday evening. I believe I closed the window after he went out. He had been drinking. There was a horrible smell."
"I came to the door while you were talking to him and I heard you say, 'What do you mean by coming here?' Who was he, Shawn?"
Again Sir Shawn was suddenly pale. She was looking down at the letter she had extracted from the pile, and he turned his back to the window, so that when she looked at him again with her frank ingenuous gaze, his face was in shadow.