"I'm Casey, your ladyship," replied the visitor in a deplorable voice, "from Killoge." "Cornelius Casey?" queried Mrs. Knox. "No, but his son, your honour ma'am, Stephen Casey, one of the tenants." "Well, come in, Stephen," said Mrs. Knox affably, supplementing her spectacles with a gold-rimmed single eye-glass, and looking at him with interest. "I knew your father well in old times, when he used to stop the earths in Killoge Wood for the Colonel. They tell me that's all cut down now?" "There's not the boiling of a kettle left in it afther Goggin, my lady!" said Casey eagerly. Mrs. Knox cut him short. "Many a good hunt the Colonel had out of Killoge, and I too, for the matter of that!" she added, turning to me; "my cousin Bessie Hamilton and I were the only huntresses in the country in those days, and people thought us shocking tomboys, I believe. Now, what with driving motors and riding astride, the gentlemen are all ladies, and the ladies are gentlemen!" With another scald-crow chuckle she turned to Casey. "Did your father ever tell you of the great hunt out of Killoge into the Fanaghy cliffs?" "He did, your ladyship, he did!" responded Casey, with a touch of life in his lamentable voice. "Often he told me that it knocked fire from his eyes to see yourself facing in at the Killoge river." "I was riding Bijou, the grandmother of old Trinket, in that run," said Mrs. Knox, leaning back in her chair, with a smile that had something of the light of other days in it. I remembered the story that Colonel Knox had run away with her after a hunt, and wondered if that had been the occasion when she had knocked fire from the eyes of Cornelius Casey. Her thin old hand drooped in momentary languor over the arm of her chair; and the woolly dog thrust his nose under it, with a beady eye fixed upon the hot cakes. "Here!" said Mrs. Knox, sitting up, and throwing a buttery bun on the floor. "Be off with you! Well, Casey," she went on, "what is it you want with me?" "Great trouble I got, Mrs. Knox, your honour ma'am," replied Casey from the door-mat, "great trouble entirely." He came a step or two nearer. He had a long, clean-shaved face, with mournful eyes, like a sick bloodhound, and the enviable, countryman's thatch of thick, strong hair, with scarcely a touch of grey in it. "That Goggin, that has the shop at Killoge Cross, has me processed. I'm pairsecuted with him; and the few little bastes I has, and me donkey and all--" his voice thinned to a whimper, "he's to drive them to-morrow----" "I suppose that's Goggin, the Gombeen?" said Mrs. Knox; "how were you fool enough to get into dealings with him?"