to itself.

"When I look up and see the mound instead of Shot it always hurts me,"
she had said in early days. "But then I feel that he likes to be near."

"He was so fond of you, Mary," her husband often said, "fonder even, I
believe, than he was of me."

"Oh, no, Shawn, not that. No one could take your place with Shot. But
he accepted me, dear old dog, and I am very proud of it."

That was before Shot's son had aspired to take his father's place,
while he was still indeed one of a likely litter of puppies in the
stable-yard, just beginning to be cast off by Judy who had other things
to do in a sporting Autumn besides looking after a lot of sprawling,
big-pawed puppies, who were quite independent of her and becoming
rather unmanageable.

It was also before old Shot had begun to return to his friends as
nothing more tangible than a padding of soft paws on the stairs, a
movement under the dining-table, where he had been accustomed to lie in
life, a sound of a dog lying down with a sigh, or getting up from the
hearthrug before the billiard-room fire.

These manifestations had sometimes perturbed visitors to Castle Talbot;
but intimates at the house had come to accept as its owners did these
sounds of a presence that was never seen. No one was any longer
incommoded by it except young Shot, who would get up uncomfortably and
lie at a distance, his nose on his paws, regarding with a wistful
melancholy the place from which he had been driven forth.

"Meself an' ould Shot'll never lave the Master till we have to," Patsy
Kenny had said to Lady O'Gara, to whom he was as much attached as old
Shot had been.

"Me an' Shot'll stick by the Master," he had often said in his own
mind, and sometimes aloud, when he was out in the paddocks with the
horses and there was no human ear to listen to him. Then he would have
a vision of a young man in a grey suit, slender and elegant, face
downward on the grass and he calling out to some one to forgive him.
"Sure God help him, he has suffered," he would add as the memory came
to him.

Patsy, who had been taking a short cut by the wood to the stable-yard
when he had come upon that sight,--it was long ago--had gone away
terrified and aching with pity for the misery he had surprised. Sir
Shawn O'Gara had interfered once to save little Patsy from a beating
and had been rewarded disproportionately by a silent ardent devotion,
at which no one,--he himself least of all,--had ever gues