The grey felt his rider relax and sway, but being young he did not understand what it meant: he was nearing a bank that he felt he could not jump, but the dread of the spur was present with him. He did his best, and but for a rotten take-off he might possibly have scrambled over. As it was, his knees took the bank, his hindquarters flew up, and he turned a somer-sault, falling over into the next field. Hugh was shot from his back and pitched on his head and shoulder beside the horse. The latter struggled to his feet, but Hugh rolled convulsively to one side with an inarticulate sound, and lay still. CHAPTER XII There was an air of calamity and yet of Sunday about the Quins’ farmyard. The pigs were shut up, tubs and buckets were put out of sight, and Tom Quin’s little nephew, in his best frock, spent many hours of blissful autocracy in driving the fowl from the doorstep to Siberias behind the rick of turf. Very early in the day two stalwart and dapper members of the Royal Irish Constabulary had made their appearance, and from time to time women in hooded blue cloaks made their way along the causeway that skirted the manure heap, groaned, crossed themselves, and entered the house. In a large shed where Tom Quin had often threshed oats and chopped furze, his body had been laid on two tables, and covered with a sheet, some superstition about the drowned forbidding that it should be taken into the house, lest death might strike another there. Awaiting inquest, the sheeted figure lay in its hidden awfulness, with the crooked rafters and the sedgy thatch above, and the candles burning at the head and feet in the grey winter air, wan yet ardent, like the flame of faith in the world’s cold noonday. Beside the body the widow Quin sat upon the earthen floor, with a black handkerchief tied over her spotless cap frill, and did not cease from the low moaning and weeping of unstanched grief. Sympathizers stood at the door and looked at her, an intense comprehension of her suffering blending itself with the inevitable fascination of the event, and prayers for the repose of the dead man’s soul were offered with a reality in which a sense of the extreme necessity for them was not concealed. It was nearly twelve o’clock when Maria Quin came out of the house with a cup of tea in her hand; she had on her black best dress, and her boots creaked loudly. She said nothing to those whom she passed, but took the cup of tea to her mother, placing it in the reluctant hand that twisted the apron corner. “Take it, asthore, take it now,” chorussed the sympathizers. “L’ave her alone. Don’t be lookin’ at her,” said her daughter, in the hard voice that had remained unshaken through the morning. She closed the door in their faces, and when she presently came out again with the empty cup, smeared with the stain of the poisonous stuff it had contained, all recognized that the first step in the consolation of the Widow Quin had been accomplished.