g! He's bound to catch cold out of this. Look out! Here's that man
that went the run with us. I'd try and wipe some of the mud off my face
if I were you!"

A younger sister of fifteen is not apt to err on the side of over
sympathy, but the deficiencies of Nora were more than made up for by the
solicitude of the stranger with the pointed beard. He hauled the colt
from his watery nest, he dried him down with handfuls of rushes, he
wiped the saddle with his own beautiful silk pocket-handkerchief. For a
stranger he displayed--so it struck Nora--a surprising knowledge of the
locality. He pointed out that Mount Purcell was seven miles away, and
that the village of Drinagh, where he was putting up--("Oho! so he's the
inspector Sir Thomas was going to be so civil to!" thought the younger
Miss Purcell with an inward grin)--was only two or three miles away.

"You know, Nora," said Muriel with an unusually conciliatory manner, "it
isn't at all out of our way, and the colt _ought_ to get a proper rub
down and a hot drink."

"I should have thought he'd had about as much to drink as he wanted, hot
or cold!" said Nora.

But Nora had not been a younger sister for fifteen years for nothing,
and it was for Drinagh that the party steered their course.

Their arrival stirred McKeown's Hotel (so-called) to its depths. Destiny
had decreed that Mrs. McKeown, being, as she expressed it, "an epicure
about boots," should choose this day of all others to go to "town" to
buy herself a pair, leaving the direction of the hotel in the hands of
her husband, a person of minor importance, and of Mary Ann Whooly, a
grey-haired kitchen-maid, who milked the cows and made the beds, and at
a distance in the back-yard was scarcely distinguishable from the
surrounding heaps of manure.

[Illustration: "THE GREY-HAIRED KITCHEN-MAID."]

The Inspector's hospitality knew no limits, and failed to recognise that
those of McKeown's Hotel were somewhat circumscribed. He ordered hot
whisky and water, mutton chops, dry clothes for Miss Purcell, fires,
tea, buttered toast, poached eggs and other delicacies simultaneously
and immediately, and the voice of Mary Ann Whooly imploring Heaven's
help for herself and its vengeance upon her inadequate assistants was
heard far in the streets of Drinagh.

"Sure herself" (herself was Mrs. McKeown) "has her box locked agin me,
and I've no clothes but what's on me!" she protested, producing after a
long interval a large brown