It was a small, square chamber, roofed with blackened oak beams, and having arched doors and windows. Its walls, partly of stone, partly of plaster roughly scratched, were whitewashed. The sanded floor was bare, save for a cowskin mat spread before the fire. A high, black-wood sideboard at one end of the room, a half-dozen stiffbacked, uncompromising looking chairs, and a table in the center, heaped with food, but without a cloth, completed the inventory of visible furniture. Mrs. O’Sullivan bustled out of the room, leaving the men together. The O’Mahony sent a final inquisitive glance from ceiling to uncarpeted floor. “So this is my ranch, eh?” he said, taking off his hat. “Sir, you’re welcome to the ancesthral abode of the O’Mahony’s of Muirisc,” answered O’Daly, gravely. “The room we stand in often enough sheltered stout Conagher O’Mahony, before confiscation dhrove him forth, and the ruffian Boyle came in. ’Tis far oldher, sir, than Ballydesmond or even Dunmanus.” “So old, the paper seems to have all come off’n the walls,” said The O’Mahony. “Well, we’ll git in a rocking-chair or so and a rag-carpet and new paper, an’ spruce her up generally. I s’pose there’s lots o’ more room in the house.” “Well, sir, rightly spakin’, there is a dale more, but it’s mostly not used, by rayson of there being no roof overhead. There’s this part of the castle that’s inhabitable, and there’s a part of the convent forninst the porch where the nuns live, but there’s more of both, not to mintion the church, that’s ruined entirely. Whatever your taste in ruins may plase to be, there’ll be something here to delight you. We have thim that’s a thousand years old, and thim that’s fallen into disuse since only last winter. Anny kind you like: Early Irish, pray-Norman, posht-Norman, Elizabethan, Georgian, or very late Victorian--here the ruins are for you, the natest and most complate and convanient altogether to be found in Munster.” The eyes of the antiquarian bard sparkled with enthusiasm as he recounted the architectural glories of Muirisc. There was no answering glow in the glance of The O’Mahony. “I’ll have a look round first thing in the morning,” he said, after the men had seated themselves at the table. A bright-faced, neatly clad girl divided with Mrs. O’Sullivan the task of bringing the supper from the kitchen beyond into the room; but it was Malachy, wearing now a curiously shapeless long black coat, instead of his driver’s jacket, who placed the dishes on the table, and for the rest stood in silence behind his new master’s chair. The O’Mahony grew speedily restless under the consciousness of Malachy’s presence close at his back. “We can git along without him, can’t we?” he asked O’Daly, with a curt backward nod.