and looked out. The pots and pans and cans
had disappeared. Down the long straight road there was no one in
sight. The woman and child had vanished.

Oddly enough he was disturbed by the noise Mustapha was still making in
his box-stall.

"I shouldn't be surprised now if he was to be a foal of Spitfire," he
said. "I did hear she was bought by a man somewhere about Lewy
mountain. The little man we bought him from was a mountainy man, if he
wasn't a fairy."

CHAPTER IV

FROM THE PAST

The morning after these happenings Lady O'Gara, turning over the pile
of letters on the breakfast table, changed colour at the sight of one
which bore an Italian postmark. It was addressed in a large firm
handwriting in which only very keen observation could have discovered
any sign of weakening. After that momentary glance she laid away the
letter with the superscription turned downwards while she read the rest
of her correspondence.

When she had finished breakfast she followed her husband into his
office, as that special room was called. The windows had not been
opened--they were French windows and they served as a door out on to
the gravel sweep which ran around the house--and she thought she
detected a faint disagreeable smell, as of drugs. She unbolted a
window and flung it wide and the warm June air came flowing in,
banishing the unpleasant sharp odour.

"You haven't been taking anything, Shawn?" she asked, looking at him a
little anxiously. "I thought I smelt something peculiar. You are not
looking well."

"I am very well, Mary," he answered. "Perhaps it was the person I had
here yesterday evening. I believe I closed the window after he went
out. He had been drinking. There was a horrible smell."

"I came to the door while you were talking to him and I heard you say,
'What do you mean by coming here?' Who was he, Shawn?"

Again Sir Shawn was suddenly pale. She was looking down at the letter
she had extracted from the pile, and he turned his back to the window,
so that when she looked at him again with her frank ingenuous gaze, his
face was in shadow.

"He was a man who saved my life, or thinks he did, at a shooting-party
at Ashbridge. There was a fellow there who had never handled a gun
before. He would have put a whole charge of shot into me if this chap,
Baker, hadn't knocked up his gun in time. I don't think it would have
killed me, although it might have been rather unpleasant. Baker likes