It had reached him in the form of a telegram running as follows: "Come at once, and stay for a year. Stagnating to death in this isolation. Asshlin." An hour later another, and a more voluminous message, had followed, in which--as if by an after-thought--he had been given the necessary directions as to the means of reaching Orristown. It was at the point where his musings reached Asshlin's telegrams that he awakened from his reverie and looked about him. For the first time a personal interest in the country through which he was passing stirred him. He realised that the salt sting of the sea had again begun to mingle with the night mist, and judged thereby that the road had again emerged upon the coast. He noticed that the hedges had become sparser; that wherever a tree loomed out of the dusk it bore the mark of the sea gales in a certain grotesqueness of shape. This was the isolation of which Asshlin had spoken! With an impulse extremely uncommon to him, he turned in his seat and addressed the silent old coachman beside him. "Has your master altered much in thirty years?" he asked. There was silence for a while. Old Burke, with the deliberation of his class, liked to weigh his words before giving them utterance. "Is it Mister Dinis changed?" he repeated at last. Then almost immediately he corrected himself. "Sure, 'tis Mister Asshlin I ought to be sayin', sir. But the ould name slips out. Though the poor master is gone these twenty-nine year--the Lord have mercy on him!--I can niver git it into me head that 'tis to Mister Dinis we ought to be lookin'." More than once during his brief stay in Ireland, Milbanke had been confronted with this annihilation of time in the Irish mind, and Burke's statement aroused no surprise. "Has he changed?" he asked again in his dry, precise voice. Burke was silent while the mare pulled hard on the reins. And having regained his mastery over her, he looked down on his companion. "Is it changed?" he said. "Sure, why wouldn't he be changed? With the father gone--an' the wife gone--an' the children growin' up. Sure 'tis changed we all are, an' goin' down the hill fast--God help us!" Milbanke glanced up sharply. "Children?" he said. "Children?" Burke turned in his seat. "Sure 'tisn't to have the ould stock die out you'd be wantin'?" he said. "You'd travel the round of the county before you'd see the like of Mister Dinis's children--though 'tis girls they are." "Girls?" Milbanke's mind was disturbed by the thought of children. Denis Asshlin with children! The idea was incongruous. "Two of 'em!" said Burke laconically. "Dear me!--dear me! And yet I suppose it's only natural. How old are they?" Burke flicked the mare lightly, and the trap lurched forward.