l the rubbish is took away in that ould
can every mornin'."

"Good God!" said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out
of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never
been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly
aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life
and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never
been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or
covering of any sort, before.

"Haven't you any poor people about here?" he asked.

"Hapes, sor."

Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked
himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the
position of a guest.

He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom,
was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night
before.

"The servants won't eat chicken," said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had
noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. "They won't eat game
either--and they throw things away if they don't like them--of course,
it's wasteful, but they _do_ give things to the poor. Lots of poor people
come here, every day nearly, but they don't care for scraps--you see, it
_is_ insulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were
animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came
first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought
to know better than to offer them the leavings."

"Cheek!"

"Well, I don't know," said Phyl. "We've done it for hundreds of years."

She closed her mouth in a way she had when she did not wish to pursue a
subject further. Despite the fact that she had made friends with Pinckney,
she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he
was a stranger; relation or no relation, he was a stranger, and what right
had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or
make remarks--he hadn't said a word--about the wastefulness of the
servants?

The redoubtable Rafferty was standing in the yard chewing a straw and
watching Larry at work.

Rafferty was a man of genius, who had started as a helper and odd job
person, and had risen to the position of factotum. He had ousted the
Scotch gardener and insinuated a relation of his own in his place. There
was scarcely a servant about the estate that was not a relation of
Raffe