Sir
Shawn, as it did to Patsy Kenny, that any one should not like horses.

There was a little mare not quite up to racing standard which he
thought would just do for Stella. Indeed, though he did not know it,
Patsy Kenny had put the idea into his head.

"That wan 'ud carry a lady in less than no time," Patsy had said, "A
lady about the size of Miss Stella. She'd take the ditches like a
bird."

But Patsy was always talking in his slow way, and Sir Shawn was not
always listening to him, or he seemed not to listen. He had a way of
forgetting his surroundings and travelling off to a distance where even
she who loved him best could not follow. But sometimes he heard when
he did not seem to hear and was unconscious of having heard. He was
going to ride Mustapha this Winter as soon, he said with his slow
smile, as Patsy Kenny would permit it. Mustapha, although a beautiful
creature to look at, had not yet been "whispered" by Patsy. He had
still an uncommonly nasty temper, and indeed most of the tricks a horse
could possess. Sir Shawn thought some hard work would improve
Mustapha's temper, but Patsy remained oddly unwilling. "Give me a week
or two longer to get over him," he would say when Sir Shawn proposed to
ride Mustapha.

He had lunched one day with Sir James Dillon, fourteen miles off, and
had waited for tea, and on the way home his horse had lost a shoe. He
hoped Mary would not be anxious. He had said he would be home by five,
and had meant it; but Lady Dillon, who was, her friends said, the
wittiest woman in Ireland, had so beguiled the time in the
billiard-room after lunch that he had not noticed it passing. And,
since he was not the man to ride a horse who had lost a shoe, he had
walked the last six Irish miles of the road.

Very seldom did he take the road on which Terence Comerford had been
killed, more than twenty years back. One could avoid it by a detour,
so he had only taken it when necessity called for the short road, and
he had always found it an ordeal. But he was not going to put an extra
mile on to the tired horse because of his own feelings.

He had come near the dreaded spot where Terence Comerford had been
flung on to the convenient heap of shingle. Already he could hear the
roar of the water where it tumbled over the weir like long green hair.
Above it on either side the banks of the river rose steeply. On the
side nearest to him was the Mount, in the heart of which Admiral
Herc