It seemed to Phyl's vision--now thoroughly distorted--that the eyes of the stranger were everywhere, cool, critical, and amused; so obsessed was her mind with this idea that it could take no hold upon the conversation. Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have been talking about Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with her unfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens' black legs, Byrne's awkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush. It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in the service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity purely Irish. "Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table," was the comment Phyl's father had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring to some form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather. The disgrace had not been removed and it was coming to the table, now, in the hand of Byrne. Phyl watched the crumbs being swept up, she watched the cloth being taken off and the wine and dessert placed in the good old fashion, on the polished mahogany, then leaving the gentlemen to their wine, she retired upstairs and to her bedroom. She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and with herself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she had never felt ashamed of the _menage_ till now. This stranger from over the water, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb her mind as few other people had disturbed it in the course of her short life. Other people had put her into worse tempers, other people had made her dislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling of unrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation against everything including herself. Her bedroom was a big room with two windows looking upon the park; it was almost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs and she made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat and pressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the clouds had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could just make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement of the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind. The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father. Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will and he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though it were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things with never a word of Him.