Miss Blow sought and, after many inquiries, found the woman who had acted as Dr. O’Grady’s house-keeper, and had basely deserted him in the hour of his extremest need. She had taken refuge, as a temporary lodger, with Patsy Devlin’s wife. It was understood that she would pay for her board and lodging when her solicitor succeeded in recovering the wages due to her. The news of the doctor’s flight had depressed her. She felt that she was greatly wronged; but even when smarting from her loss, she was not so heartless as to revenge herself by telling the terrible truth to an innocent and beautiful creature like Miss Blow. She gave it as her opinion that the doctor, driven to desperation, perhaps almost starved, had poisoned himself. He had, she asserted, bottles enough in his surgery to poison the whole country. His body, she believed, was lying in the house behind the locked doors. “If so be,” she added, “that the rats haven’t him ate; for the like of that house with rats, I never seen. Many’s the time, when the doctor would be out, I’ve sat the whole evening on the kitchen table, with my legs tucked up under me, and them running across the floor the same as hens would come to you when you’d be calling them. You couldn’t put down a dish out of your hand, but they’d whip the bit off of it before your eyes, without you’d have some sort of a cover to put over it.” No one who was even slightly acquainted with Dr. O’Grady could suppose him capable of suicide under any conceivable circumstances. Miss Blow, who of course knew him well, was quite unimpressed by the housekeeper’s horrible suggestion. But she realized that the truth, whatever it was, was not to be reached by inquiries. Jimmy O’Loughlin and Patsy Devlin lied to her. So did Biddy Halloran. So did the house-keeper. There was evidently an organized conspiracy among the people of Clonmore for the concealment of the truth. Miss Blow had a logical mind. It seemed plain to her that if everybody agreed to tell lies the truth must be something of a dangerous or uncomfortable kind. She had some knowledge of Ireland, gleaned from the leading articles of English newspapers. She knew, for instance, that it was a country of secret societies, of midnight murders, of defeated justice, of lawlessness which scorned the cloak of hypocrisy. She had heard of reigns of terror, emphasized by the epithet “veritable.” She was firmly convinced that the lives of respectable people were not safe on the west side of the Shannon. Her father, Mr. Blow of the cigars, was an earnest politician, and at election times his house was full of literature about Ireland which his daughter read. Her experience of the people of Clonmore went far beyond her worst expectations. She made up her mind that Dr. O’Grady had been murdered; that everybody in the place knew the fact; and that, either through fear or an innate fondness for crime, no one would help to bring the murderers to justice.