red that Stella was there.

She got up quite cheerfully when she saw him.

"You are late, dear boy," she said. Her heart had gone up because so
many good things had happened this morning. Shawn was better and had
recognized her. The wretch who would have hurt him in the secret
places of his heart had gone on farther. Stella was doing well. It
was always the way with her to be irrationally hopeful. Many and many
a time she had had to ask herself why, on some particular day, she was
feeling particularly happy, and had had to trace back the cause to
something so small that even she had forgotten it. The founts of
happiness in her were very quick to flow.

"There is a cold game pie here," she said, "and there is some curry
which I have sent down to keep warm. Also there is pressed beef and a
cold pheasant on the sideboard. I suggest that you begin with the
curry and go on to the other things."

He did not answer her, but sat down with a weary air. She looked at
him in quick alarm. He was not looking well.

"What is the matter, Terry?" she asked anxiously.

"Oh, nothing, darling, to make you look so frightened. Only I have had
a rather gruesome experience. I found a dead man, and such an ugly
one!"

"A dead man!"

"Yes--just by old Hercules O'Hart's tomb. The place will have twice as
bad a name now."

"What sort of a man?"

"Oh, a tramp, apparently. He appeared to have fallen from the Mount.
He might have been running in the dark and shot out violently over the
edge. From the look of him I should say he had broken his neck. You
know how thick the moss is there under the trees. You would not think
the fall could have hurt him, but he is stone-dead. I didn't want him
brought here so I ran off and got some men who are building a Congested
Districts Board house on the Tubber road to lift him. The body is in
the stable belonging to the pub. There will have to be an inquest, I
suppose, and I shall have to give evidence. A beastly bore." He began
to cut himself a slab out of the game pie absent-mindedly.

"Terry," she said, "I think I know the man. He has been about here
lately. Patsy would know. If he is the man I think, he is the husband
of Susan Horridge, the little woman at the South lodge."

"Oh--that Patsy's so sweet on! He was a bad lot, wasn't he? A brute
to that poor little woman and the delicate child. He didn't look a
nice person."

He gave a fastidious little shudder.

"We