After a few more words of no interest with Gorman, Jerry O'Brien went into the private office of O'Hanlon, and found that gentleman encircled by hedges of legal documents, fast asleep, with a newspaper before him. The opening of the door roused the solicitor, who straightway sprang to his feet, exclaiming:

"My dear O'Brien, delighted to see you! Sit down. I'll be back in a moment."

He left the room, hastened into the outer office, asked Gorman what o'clock it was, and if the mail had been delivered yet, and then hurried back to his client, saying:

"Excuse my running away; there was something I had to say to my clerk. Now, how are you? What kind of a night had you?"

"I'm quite well, and had an excellent night. And you?"

"Oh, bad, bad! Nothing could be much worse. I didn't get an hour's sleep. I was dozing as you came in. Don't say anything about it. Remember your promise! But I am sure I am breaking down. I am certain I shall break down mentally soon."

"Nonsense!" cried O'Brien, cheerfully. "I am not going to listen to that rubbish in the noonday."

"And a beautiful noonday it is," said O'Hanlon, looking out into the meagrely illumined back-yard, with its grass-green water-butt resting unevenly on its grass-green stand; its flower-pots three-quarters full of completely sodden clay; its brokenhearted, lopsided, bedraggled whisk, reclining dejectedly partly against the humid white wall and partly against the bulged and staring water-butt; its dilapidated wooden shed that did not go through the farce of sheltering anything from the universal moisture save a battered watering-pot without a rose; and its ghastly six-foot-high arbor vitÆ--a shrub which makes even summer sunshine look dull.

"I've been looking over the papers you lent me, and I had a chat with Gorman before I came into this room. Gorman told me more of Davenport and long ago than I knew up to this. But I can make nothing of your old client, and am sure the apparition was the result of pure nervous relaxation."

"But, confound it, my dear O'Brien, can't you see extreme mental relaxation is what I am in dread of?"

"Well, then, I won't say that. I'll say it was pure or impure liquor, or liver, or anything you like. Of only one thing am I sure--namely, that there was more than a little between this Fahey and Davenport."

"That's my own impression too; but I can make nothing of these documents."

"It is not intended you should be able to make anything of them; and if I were you, now that the two men concerned in them are dead and done for, I'd bother no more about them."

"Get it out of your head for good and all, O'Brien, that I am troubling about the men. I am not; I am troubling about myself. I am afraid I am going to have something seriously wrong with my brain, and that's not a comfortable thing for a man who is not yet old to get into his mind."

"Well, I'm sure I don't know what to do. I have often heard it said that one of the best ways to adopt in a case of this kind is to bring the man face to face with the thing which causes him annoyance----"

"What! Bring me face to face with what I saw! I think, O'Brien, your brain is giving way before merely the story of my troubles."

"No, no; I mean to set you face to face with the scene of your adventure, and then when you perceive nothing unusual there, you will be less disturbed by the memory of your last visit than you are now. I myself am curious to look at the place once more. Will you drive over with me now, and put your mind at rest for ever?"

He spoke earnestly, considerately.

O'Hanlon thought a moment, and then said with a sigh, followed by a lugubrious smile:

"I don't know about putting my mind at rest, but I think the drive would do me good. I have been staying too much indoors of late. Yes, I'll go. I'll be ready in half-an-hour. Call for me then, and I'll have a car waiting outside. I hope the weather will keep up."

O'Brien called at the time appointed, and they drove away towards Kilcash.

When they cleared the city, their road lay through miles of bog and marsh, in which nothing grew but flags and osiers and bulrushes, with here and there patches of thin rank grass. The causeway along which they drove had been formed of the earth obtained from cuttings on each side of it, and these cuttings made long straight lines of dreary canals, uncheered by traffic. Snipe, and duck, and cranes were to be seen here, but the ground was rotten, and, in places, dangerous. As far as the eye could reach no human habitation was to be seen. On one of these canals a poor hare-brained enthusiast had built a small mill, now fallen into the last stage of decay. The useless water had no power to turn the useless wheel. Now and then a bald gray rock rose a few feet above the flat monotony of the swamp. To right and left, low green hills touched the leaden sky. All in front and behind was cheerless, unbroken morass.

The air was heavy with moisture, but no rain fell. The iron rails, woodwork, and cushions of the car were clammy to the touch. The horse's head drooped as he plodded spiritlessly along the dark, miry road. The driver wore an oilcap, oilskin coat, and had a heavy, sodden, yellow rug about his knees. He used the whip with monotonous regularity and monotonous absence of result. The horse seemed to feel that not even man could be in a hurry on such a day. There was no movement in sky, or air, or on the land. The car startled two cranes that were fishing by the side of the road. They rose and fled with such intolerable slowness as proclaimed their belief that no creature which had once gone beneath could ever get from under the flat pressure of those purposeless clouds--could ever shake off the slimy unctuousness of the land.

The two travellers sat back to back, holding their heads forward against the soft, clinging, clammy air. They scarcely spoke a word the whole way. The landscape afforded no subject for pleasant remark, and the younger man did not care to make matters gloomier. He had nothing new to communicate, so he smoked in silence. The elder man could not rouse himself to take an interest in any subject not immediate to himself, and the driver was half asleep.

At last the ground began to rise very gradually. They were getting near the sea. The air grew lighter, fresher, brisker. A thin white vapour lay upon the marsh and rolled slowly inward, yet no wind could be felt. The air had grown much warmer, and although the dull pall of leaden sky still spread unbroken above, it could be felt that sunlight existed somewhere overhead. The bleak vacuity of an overcast winter day was being insensibly filled with assurances of activity and life, and from the wide sweep of the full horizontal front there was the breath, the inchoate murmur as though the leaves of a hundred thousand trees felt the approach of wind. That was the fine, broad, opening phrase of the diapason tones drawn by the ocean from the shore in its portentous prelude to the silence of eternity.

Higher and higher they crawled slowly, gradually, until they could tell what part of the sky lay over the sea by reason of its greater whiteness.

And now the various movements in the orchestra of the sea began to assemble and marshal before their ears. Here the shrill silver hiss of the long waves toppling in curved cascades, and running swiftly inland on the sand. Here the roar and rattle of stubborn boulders torn from their rocky holds by the mad out-wash of the shattered wave. Here the low hollow groaning of protesting caves, vocal, inscrutable. Afar off the deep boom of the mighty wave, which, gliding up to the land, a green, unbroken mound of water, flung itself in white, impotent rage against the unrepining, unappalled, forlorn cliffs, and made the air thunder with mutinous clamour.

There was no storm--nothing beyond the ordinary winter roller of the Atlantic.

The car stopped, and the two friends descended.

"It's only a few hundred yards from this to the cliff over the Black Rock," said the driver. "But it's lonely there on a day like this. Don't go down. Don't trust yourself on that rock a day like this. She may begin any minute a day like this, and if she catches you between her and the water, you're dead men."

The two friends struck across the downs, the younger leading the way.