wo before that Patsy
had taken up the fiddle again--Patsy was a great fiddler--that he could
hear him playing his old tunes night after night. There had been an
interval during which the fiddle had been silent. She thought that,
with the simple craft of his class, Patsy might have played the fiddle
to let possible gossips know that he was at home in the solitude which
in the old times before Susan came he had never seemed to find solitary.

"Is that you, m'lady?" said Patsy. "The dark was near comin' up wid
ye. I'd like if you'd the time you'd come in and see Susan. She's
frightened like in herself an' she won't listen to rayson."

"Why, what's the matter?" asked Lady O'Gara, turning towards the lodge,
while Patsy re-padlocked the gate. She did not wait for his answer,
which was slow of coming. Patsy was always deliberate.

In the quiet and cheerful interior of the lodge she found a terrified
Susan. Michael lay on the hearth-rug before a bright fire, Georgie sat
by the white, well-scrubbed table, his cheek on his hand, the lamplight
on his pale fine hair, watching his mother anxiously; the lesson book
on top of a pile of others, was plainly forgotten.

Susan seemed desperately frightened. She got out the reason why at
last, with some help from Patsy Kenny. She shook as she told the tale.
She had been washing, outside the lodge, earlier in the day,
fortunately out of view of the gate, when some one had shaken it and
cursed at finding it locked. Susan had seen his hand, a coarse hairy
hand, thrust through the gate in an attempt to force the lock. The
man, whoever he was, had gone on his way, seeing the futility of trying
to enter by the strongly padlocked gate. Susan had locked herself in
the lodge till Georgie had come home from school, when the two of them
had fled to Patsy Kenny for protection.

"The poor girl will have it that Baker has come back," said Patsy,
scratching his head. "She says she knew his voice an' the
wicked-looking hand of him. If it was to be him itself--but I had the
Master's word for it he had gone to America--he wouldn't know she was
here. I keep on tellin' her that, but she won't listen."

Lady O'Gara had a passing wonder about Shawn's having known that
Susan's husband was gone to America--she had not associated the person
who had saved Shawn from accident at Ashbridge Park with Susan's
graceless husband.

"He might find out by asking questions," said Susan. "He's only got