Hennessey, “I want to show this gentleman round. Let’s see the stables.”

Rafferty touched his cap and led the way, showing first the stalls and boxes where four or five horses were stabled, and then leading the way through the coach-house to the path from which opened the kitchen gardens.

They were immense and walled in with red brick, capable, one might fancy, of supplying the wants of three or four houses the size of Kilgobbin. 58

58

Pinckney noted this fact, also that the home farm to which the kitchen gardens led was apparently a prosperous and going little concern, with its fowls and chickens penned or loose, styes filled with grunting pigs, and turkeys gobbling and spreading their tails in the sun.

“Who looks after all this?” asked Pinckney.

“I do, sor,” replied Rafferty.

“What are the takings?”

“I beg your pardon, sor?”

“The profits, I mean. You sell these things, don’t you?”

“Kilgobbin isn’t a farm, sor, it’s a gintleman’s estate.”

Pinckney, not at all set back by this snub, turned and looked the factotum in the face.

“Just so,” said he, “but I’ve never heard of gentlemen growing pigs to look at; peacocks, maybe, but not pigs. However, we’ll have another look at the business later.”

He turned and they went on, Rafferty disturbed in his mind and much put about by the manner of the other in whom he began to divine something more than a casual guest, Phyl almost as much put out as Rafferty.

The idea that the factotum might have been robbing her father right and left never occurred to her; even if it had, it would not have softened the fact that a strange hand was at work in her old home turning over things, inspecting them, holding them up for comment.

She managed to drop behind as they left the farm 59 yard for the paddocks, then turning down the yew lane that led back to the house, she ran as though hounds were after her, reached the house, locked herself in her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed in a 

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