When Lord Manton returned to Clonmore in May, 1905, after his usual visit to his daughter in Grosvenor Street, he at once asked Dr. O’Grady to dinner. There was on this occasion a special reason for the invitation, though doubtless it would have been given and accepted without any reason. Lord Manton wanted to know all that could be known about a new tenant who had taken Rosivera for six months. Rosivera, long used as a dower house by Lord Manton’s ancestors, was not an easy place to let. It stood eight miles from the village of Clonmore, on the shore of a small land-locked bay. It was a singularly unattractive building, rectangular, grey, four storeys high, and lit by small ineffective windows. There was no shooting connected with it nor any fishing of the kind appreciated by a sportsman. There were, it was believed, small flat fish to be caught in the bay, but no one thought it worth while to pursue these creatures earnestly. Occasionally an adventurous Englishman, cherishing some romantic idea of the west of Ireland, rented the house for August and September. Occasionally a wealthy Dublin doctor brought his family there for six weeks. None of these tenants ever came a second time. The place was too solitary for the social, too ugly for the amateurs of the picturesque, utterly dull for the sportsman, and had not even the saving grace of an appeal to the romantic. The mother and grandmother of Lord Manton had died there, but in the odour of moderate sanctity. Their ghosts wandered down no corridors. Indeed, no ghosts could have haunted, no tradition attached itself to a house with the shape and appearance of Rosivera. There was, therefore, something interesting and curious in the fact that a tenant had taken the place for six months and had settled down there early in March, a time of year at which even a hermit, vowed to a life entirely devoid of incident, might have hesitated to fix his cell at Rosivera. “The first thing that struck me as queer about the man,” said Lord Manton, after dinner, “was his name. Did you ever hear of anybody called Red? Scarlett, of course, is comparatively common.” “So is Black,” said Dr. O’Grady, “and Brown, and Grey, and White. I’ve heard of Pink, and I once met a man called Blue, but he spelt it ‘ew.’” “Guy Theodore Red is this man’s name. Guy and Theodore are all right, of course, but Red----!” “Is he safe for the rent, do you think?” “He has paid the whole six months in advance,” said Lord Manton, “and he never asked a question about the drains. He’s the only tenant I ever heard of who didn’t make himself ridiculous about drains.” “He hasn’t got typhoid yet,” said Dr. O’Grady. “If he’s the kind of man who pays six months’ rent in advance and asks no questions, I hope he soon will.” “Unfortunately for you he seems to have neither wife nor children.”