She paused, and put her head on one side, as if waiting for the prompter. "How does it go? 'She thought some spirit of the sky had done the bold mosstrooper wrong!'" She paused again, and looked at me; the evening light shone on her spectacles, and made them impenetrable. "Now I'm going to give you a piece of advice; "'And I'll not take it!' says Major Yeates, R.M.!" I protested that I had said nothing of the kind. She prodded me in the knee with a goblin finger. "_Close that well_! Put on the flagstone, and seal it down again!" She fumbled in her shawls, and pulled out a thin old gold chain. "Here's the seal, the same one that my father sealed it with at the time of the Famine!" I said that I was ready to do anything that she told me, but it would be interesting to know why. Mrs. Knox detached the seal from her chain, to which it was knotted by something that I darkly suspected to be a bit of bootlace. It was a cornelian seal, made in the grand manner; massively wrought, the gold smooth from age. "I daresay you never heard of Major Apollo Riggs? He drove up to this house one fine day in a coach-and-four. Next day the coach-and-four drove away, but Major Apollo Riggs was not in it!" "He found himself a success at Shreelane?" I suggested. "Not so much with his host as his hostess!" returned Mrs. Knox portentously. "A duel?" I asked. "He was never seen again, my dear!" replied Mrs. Knox. (There are moments, in Ireland, when this term of affection is used not so much affectionately as confidentially.) At this point the door opened. Mrs. Knox put the goblin finger on her lips, as Philippa, still in her habit, slid into the room. "The patient and Meg are extremely self-sufficing," she said, dropping into a chair. "His face is turning all colours of the rainbow, and one eye has disappeared, but the other is full of expression and is fixed on Meg!" "There's not much colour about _you_," I said. "You ought to have a whisky and soda." "Nonsense!" said Philippa, waving me away; "we've got most of the black stuff out of his hair; even his waistcoat pocket was full of it! And bits of the torn paper had stuck to it, like confetti." "That suggests a wedding," I observed. "Quite," said Philippa. "But the absurd thing was that one of the confetti--obviously a bit of those old letters that the children tore up--had the word 'Apollo' on it! It was stuck on to him like a label." Mrs. Knox clasped her hands, and lay back in her chair. "I said it was, of course, a tribute to his beauty, but Meg was not at all amused. She thought it was 'lèse majesté.'" "She'll get over that in time," I said, putting the seal in my pocket. VII WHEN I FIRST MET DR. HICKEY