An immense panic seized him, and his hands checked the horse as it rose to the jump--a savage jerk on curb and snaffle. The gray was already in the air. Its hind legs came down uncertain. Its great bulk fell backward. Fear flooded him like cold water. In an instant he knew his neck would be broken like a dry twig. Christ! There it went! Snap! VII "Dark childeen, what is wrong with you? What is wrong? There was a wing in my heart until I saw you coming." "Nurse Ellen, there 's a man dead at the abbey. I saw him die, with my two eyes." "_O alanna veg_! Is it any one we know? It isn't the master, is it, or Sir Maurice?" "No, Nurse Ellen, no! It's no one I know. I was sitting reading by Mother's grave, and a wee red fox, a wee hunted fox, ran up to me for help. And then the man came jumping the wall, and his horse reared and he was killed. I never saw him before, but we know him, Nurse Ellen. I know we do." "Why dotey child? Why do you say so?" "He saw me and he took me for Mother, Nurse Ellen. He called, 'Reynardine!'" "Was he a dour, black man, child of grace? Would you be afraid of him, and he alive?" "Yes, that's he, Nurse Ellen. Who is it we know?" "It's no one we know, _a lanna_. No one at all." "But he called, 'Reynardine!'" "You only think so, dark childeen, you trembling there and standing by your mother's grave. A trick your mind played you, _machree dheelish_. He was no one you know, or nothing to you. Only a strange man was it, a strange bad man." DRAMATIS PERSONÆ I It must be for the thousandth time now he was sitting down at the neat table looking out on the little lawn, and trying to get his ideas together, trying to get something new, something startling, that would awaken these hard-boiled men who had control of theaters, magazines, publishing houses to the sense that he was alive, worth while, valuable. If he could only think up a new detective, or--or something. Any other than he would have given up the game long ago, but he knew he had talent--he would n't go quite so far as to say genius, but great talent. It was no use their turning him down all the time. He was certain they never read the stuff. He was certain, too, there was some trick, some knack he had n't discovered. Just some little trick. These men of national, international fame--he could see from their faces they had no especial brains, any more than he had. But just some little trick he could n't get. He had taken courses in writing, gone to schools of journalism, and here were all his manuscripts with neat rejection slips; here was what he thought the great American novel battered and dog-eared, a study of the temptations of a girl in the great city; and here was his crook drama, that some filthy reader had marked with the rim of a coffee cup. It was enough to make a man quit.