dessert placed in the good old fashion, on the polished mahogany, then leaving the gentlemen to their wine, she retired upstairs and to her bedroom.

She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and with herself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she had never felt ashamed of the ménage till now. This stranger from over the water, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb her mind as few other people had disturbed it in the course of her short life. Other people had put her into worse tempers, other people had made her dislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling of unrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation against everything including herself.

Her bedroom was a big room with two windows 23 looking upon the park; it was almost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs and she made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat and pressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the clouds had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could just make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement of the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind.

23

The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father.

Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will and he had come into the dead man’s house as unconcernedly as though it were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things with never a word of Him.

If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps, this silence of Pinckney’s was the silence of delicacy, not of indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes came to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it.

She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him. 24

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What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative to stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of 

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