n his mind for other impressions.

"She's into the hat shop!" said Mr. Rupert Gunning to himself in the
window of the club, recognising his recent purchase and the full measure
of the calamity in one and the same moment.

He also recognised in its perfection the fact, already suspected by him,
that he had been a fool.

Upheld by this soothing reflection he went out into the street, where
awaited him the privileges of proprietorship. These began with the
despatching of the mare, badly cut, and apparently lame on every leg, in
charge of the remains of the under-strapper, to her destination. They
continued with the consolation of the hospital nurse, and embraced in
varying pecuniary degrees the compensation of the sandwich man, the
newspaper boy, and the proprietor of the hat shop. During all this time
he enjoyed the unfaltering attention of a fair-sized crowd, liberal in
comment, prolific of imbecile suggestion. And all these things were only
the beginning of the trouble.

Mr. Gunning proceeded to his room and to the packing of his portmanteau
for that evening's mail-boat to Holyhead in a mood of considerable
sourness. It may be conceded to him that circumstances had been of a
souring character. He had bought Miss Fanny Fitzroy's grey mare at the
Horse Show for reasons of an undeniably sentimental sort. Therefore,
having no good cause to show for the purchase, he had made it secretly,
the sum of sixty pounds, for an animal that he had consistently crabbed,
amounting in the eyes of the world in general to a rather advanced
love-token, if not a formal declaration. He had planned no future for
the grey mare, but he had cherished a trembling hope that some day he
might be in a position to restore her to her late owner without
considering the expression in any eyes save those which, a couple of
hours ago, had recalled to him the play of lights in a Connemara trout
stream.

Now, it appeared, this pleasing vision must go the way of many others.

The August sunlight illumined Mr. Gunning's folly, and his bulging
portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a passion can pack;
when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness
irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had
been his confederate in the purchase of the mare.

"What did the vet say, Brennan?" said Mr. Gunning, with the brevity of
ill humour.

Mr. Brennan paused before replying, a pause laden with the promise of
evil tidi