eak every bone of his body." ... I perceived my temper
was undoing me. I invented rapidly but thinly. "As a matter of fact,
Riddling, it's quite another sort of lady has set us by the ears."

Riddling stuck his chin out, tucked in the corners of his mouth, made
round eyes at the breakfast things and, hands in pockets, rocked from
heels to toes and from toes to heels. "I see Stratton, yes, I see. Yes,
all this makes it very plain, of course. Very plain.... Stupid thing,
scandal is.... Thanks! no, I won't have a cigarette."

And he left me presently with an uncomfortable sense that he did see,
and didn't for one moment intend to restrain his considerable histrionic
skill in handing on his vision to others. For some moments I stood
savoring this all too manifest possibility, and then my thoughts went
swirling into another channel. At last the curtain was pierced. I was no
longer helplessly in the dark. I got out my Bradshaw, and sat with the
map spread out over the breakfast things studying the routes to Mayo.
Then I rang for Williams, the man I shared with the two adjacent
flat-holders, and told him to pack my kit-bag because I was suddenly
called away.

Sec. 13

Many of the particulars of my journey to Ireland have faded out of my
mind altogether. I remember most distinctly my mood of grim elation that
at last I had to deal with accessible persons again....

The weather was windy and violent, and I was sea-sick for most of the
crossing, and very tired and exhausted when I landed. Williams had
thought of my thick over-coat and loaded me with wraps and rugs, and I
sat in the corner of a compartment in that state of mental and bodily
fatigue that presses on the brows like a painless headache. I got to
some little junction at last where I had to wait an hour for a
branch-line train. I tasted all the bitterness of Irish hospitality, and
such coffee as Ireland alone can produce. Then I went on to a station
called Clumber or Clumboye, or some such name, and thence after some
difficulty I got a car for my destination. It was a wretched car in
which hens had been roosting, and it was drawn by a steaming horse that
had sores under its mended harness.

An immense wet wind was blowing as we came over the big hill that lies
to the south of Mirk. Everything was wet, the hillside above me was
either intensely green sodden turf or great streaming slabs of
limestone, seaward was a rocky headland, a ruin of a beehive shape, and
b