I knew, of course, that it wasn't. The remarkable thing about Roscarna, to anyone with a ha'porth of imagination, was Gabrielle Hewish. Luckily that admirable gossip Hoylake had another interest in life besides fishing stories, and one that served my purpose,--genealogy. It is an interest not uncommon with old soldiers--that is why they often write such incredibly dull memoirs--and after allowing him a number of sporting digressions in the direction of a Lochanillaun pike and the altogether admirable blackgame shooting at Roscarna, which, he assured me, was better than anything in the west except Lord Dudley's shoot on the Corrib, I played him tactfully into the deeper water that interested me and, by the end of the week, had succeeded in drawing from him a good deal of irrelevant family history and, what is more to the point, a fairly consecutive account of the last of the Hewishes, Sir Jocelyn and his amazing daughter. As he told it to me in the parlour of the fishing inn beside the Dulas, I began to realise that accidentally, and at the moment when I needed it most, I had stumbled on a fountain of curious knowledge. If I had missed meeting him, my story, fascinating as it was, would have been incomplete. It armed me with a whole new theory of Gabrielle, suggesting causes, or, if you like, preparations for the extraordinary episode that followed. It showed me that I had been flattering myself that I knew all about it when, as a matter of fact, I had only got hold of one--and the wrong--end of the stick. I fished the Dulas for a fortnight, hypnotised, pondering on the whole curious business, not only when the bright water rippled by me, but when old Hoylake told me stories of mahseer and tiger fish and barracuda that he had missed, when I was walking through the pinewoods under the mountain, when I was eating, and, I verily believe, when I was asleep. I had thought before that my friend Mrs. Payne was the heroine of the story. Now I am not sure that Gabrielle does not share the honours. I And, first of all, I dreamed of Roscarna. Partly for the sheer pleasure of reconstructing a shadowy countryside that I remembered, partly because Roscarna, the house in which the Hewish family had run to seed in its latter generations, was very much to the point. Twenty miles from Galway--and Irish miles, at that--it stands at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the tract that is called Joyce's Country, a district famous for inbreeding and idiocy where everyone was called Joyce, excepting, of course, the Hewishes of Roscarna, who were aliens, Elizabethan adventurers from the county of Devon, cousins of the Earls of Halberton, who had planted themselves upon the richest of the Joyces' lands in the early seventeenth century and built their house in the English fashion of the time.