over years. At last Gallagher looked up.

"It's all over," he said in a hushed voice.

For a minute no one spoke, no one moved. It seemed as if the whole room
was petrified. Then Gallagher quietly laid the body back upon the
pillows, and as though the action broke the spell, Clodagh gave a
sudden sharp cry and ran forward to the bed.

CHAPTER V

The three days that followed Asshlin's death resolved themselves into
so many hours of gloom and confusion, that found their culmination in
the funeral ceremony.

To Irishmen of every class, a funeral is invested with an almost
symbolic importance, and a solemn consideration is bestowed upon its
most minute details. And Milbanke, deeply imbued with the horror and
suddenness of the whole disaster, was filled with a growing
astonishment at the numberless preliminaries--the amount of precedence
and prestige requiring consideration--before one poor human body could
be hidden away. But he rose dutifully to the occasion and proved
himself unfailingly patient and conscientious in every emergency, from
the first repugnant interview with the undertaker to the woeful
breakfast, partaken of in the early hours of the funeral morning, with
the curtains drawn across the dining-room windows and the candles in
the massive silver sconces shedding an unnatural light upon the table
laden with eatables.

The guests who partook of this meal were men of varied and interesting
types; but whatever their characteristic differences, it was remarkable
that the same air of responsibility and solemnity inspired them all. It
did not matter that many of them had been personal enemies of the dead
man; that many, with that jealous distrust of unconventionality that
reigns in Ireland, had markedly drawn away from him in the last ten
years of his life; death had obliterated everything. Asshlin's
eccentricities, his lawlessness, his contempt for the little world in
which he lived were all forgotten. He was one of themselves--deserving,
in death at least, the same consideration that the county had bestowed
upon his father, his grandfather, and those who had gone before them.

The faces of these men were unfamiliar to Milbanke, though each on
entering the dining-room shook him cordially and sympathetically by the
hand. The meal was partaken of almost in silence; and it was with
obvious relief that, one after another, the members of the party rose
from table and passed into the darkened hall, and from