“Well, then, I tell you that O’Daly _can_ be made to show up, and the whole affair can be set straight, and the young lady--my cousin--_can_ be put into her own again. Only I can’t work in the dark. I can’t play with a partner that ‘finesses’ against me, as a whist-player would say. Now, who is this man here? I know he isn’t your cousin any more than he is mine. What’s his game?” Linsky took the words out of his puzzled companion’s mouth. “’T is a long story, sir,” he said, “an’ you’d be no wiser if you were told it. Some time, plase God, you’ll know it all. Just now’t is enough that I’m bound to this man and to The O’Mahony, who’s away, an’ perhaps dead an’ buried, an’ I’m heart an’ sowl for doin’ whatever I can to help the young lady. Only, if you’ll not moind me sayin’ so, she’s her own worst inemy. If she takes the bit in her mouth this way, an’ will go into the convint, how, in the name of glory, are we to stop her or do anything else?” “There are more than fifteen hundred ways of working _that_” replied the young man from Houghton County, simulating a confidence he did not wholly feel. “But let’s get along down toward the village.” They entered Muirisc through the ancient convent churchyard, and at his door-way Jerry, as the visible result of much cogitation, asked the twain in. After offering them glasses of whiskey and water and lighting a pipe, Jerry suddenly resolved upon a further extension of confidence. To Linsky’s astonishment, he took the lantern down from the wall, lighted it, and opened the door at the back of the bed. “If you’ll come along wid us, sir,” he said to Bernard, “we’ll show you something.” “There, here we can talk at our aise,” he remarked again, when finally the three men were in the subterranean chamber, with the door closed behind them. “Have you anything like _this_ in Ameriky?” Bernard was not so greatly impressed as they expected him to be. He stolled about the vault-like room, sounding the walls with his boot, pulling-aside the bed-curtains and investigating the drain. “Curious old place,” he said, at last. “What’s the idea?” “Sure, ’t is a sacret place intoirely,” explained Jerry. “Besides us three, there’s not a man aloive who knows of it, exceptin’ The O’Mahony, if be God’s grace he’s aloive. ’T was he discovered it. He’d the eyes of a him-harrier for anny mark or sign in a wall. Well do I remimber our coming here first. He lukked it all over, as you’re doing. “‘Egor!’ says he, ‘It may come in handy for O’Daly some day.’ There was a dead man there on the bed, that dry ye c’u’d ’a’ loighted him wid a match.” “’T is a part of the convint,” Linsky took up the explanation, “an’ the chest, there, was full of deeds an’ riccorcls of the convint for manny cinturies. ‘T was me work for years to decipher an’ thranslate thim, unbeknownst to every soul in Muirisc. They were all in Irish.”