from the trap, for its cries had ceased, cut off all of a sudden as though by a closing door.

Phyl paused to listen and look around her. Through all the night from here, from there, came thin traces of sound, threads fretting the silence. The trotting of a horse a mile away on the Arranakilty road, the bark of a dog from near the Round House, the shaky bleat of a sheep from the fold at Ross’ farm came distinct yet diminished almost to vanishing point. It was like listening to the country sounds of Lilliput. With these came the vaguest whisper of flowing water, broken now and again by a little shudder of wind in the leafless branches of the trees.

“He’s out,” said Phyl to herself. She was thinking of the fox. She knew that the trap must be somewhere about and she guessed who had set it. Rafferty, without a doubt, for only the other day he had been complaining of the foxes having raided the chickens, but there was no use in hunting for the thing by this light and without any indication of its exact whereabouts, so she struck on, determined to return to the house by the more open ground leading through the Druids’ glen.

She had been here before in the very early morning 28 before sunrise on her way to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she had never seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused for a moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by the cromlech.

28

Phyl, despite her American strain, was very Irish in one particular: though cheerful and healthy and without a trace of morbidness in her composition, she, still, was given to fits of melancholy—not depression, melancholy. It is in the air of Ireland, the moist warm air that feeds the shamrock and fills the glens with soft-throated echoes and it is in the soul of the people.

Phyl, seated in this favourite spot of hers, where she had played as a child on many a warm summer’s afternoon, gave herself over to the moonlight and the spirit of Recollection.

She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he had occasioned in her mind had sunk to rest; she was thinking of her father, of all the pleasant days that were no more—she remembered her dolls, the wax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with that mysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face, true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju to be propitiated. That thing had stirred in 

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