"My dear," wrote Miss Grimshaw in another letter to that lady friend, "here we are at last. We arrived the day before yesterday evening, horses and all, including the servants. I once heard an old lady in the States giving good advice to a young woman just married. One sentence clung to me, and will, I think, by its truth, cling to me for ever. 'Never move servants.'

"We took with us from Ireland Mrs. Driscoll, the cook, and Norah, the parlour-maid, besides the menservants. I am not referring to the men when I repeat that axiom, 'Never move servants,' but to the womenfolk.

"We had not started from Holyhead when Mrs. Driscoll broke down. She weighs fourteen stone, and does everything in a large way. She broke down from homesickness. She had travelled well up to that. The crossing had been smooth, and she had not made a single complaint, fighting bravely, I suppose, all the time, against the growing nostalgia. Then on the platform at Holyhead, before the waiting Irish mail, it all came out at once. It sounds absurd, but really the thing was tragic. Real grief is always tragic, even the grief of a child over a broken toy, and this was real grief, and it taught me more in five minutes about Ireland and why the Irish in America hate England than I learned from all my months spent in the country itself.

"It did not seem grief for a lost country so much as for a lost father or mother, and, mind you, she was with people she knew, and she was only being 'expatriated' for a few months. What must they have suffered in the old days, those people driven from their homes and holdings to a country three thousand miles away, never to come back?"

Miss Grimshaw, in her letter, continued:

"Mr. French got Mrs. Driscoll brandy from the refreshment-room, and we took her in the first-class carriage with us, but all her cry was to go back, and what lent a grim humour to the situation was the fact that none of us can go back to Ireland from this expedition into England till a certain something has been accomplished.

"There seems something mysterious and sinister in that statement, but there is really nothing sinister in the situation. Only a horse. However, to return to the servants. Mrs. D. has recovered somewhat, but Norah, the parlour-maid, has now broken down. She is a pretty girl with black hair, grey eyes, and beautiful teeth, and she is sitting at the moment in the kitchen, with her apron over her head, 'eating her heart out,' to use Mrs. Driscoll's expression. The curious thing is that both these women have no relations of any account to tie them to Ireland. It's just Ireland itself they want—and it seems to me they won't be happy till they get it.

"The woman from Crowsnest, whom Mr. Dashwood got to tidy the place up and light the fires and have supper for us the evening we came, has left. She did not get on with the others; and now this place is all Irish with the exception of me—a bit of the west coast planted above a most staid and respectable English village. I wonder what the result will be as far as intercommunication goes?

"No one has called yet; but, of course, it is too soon. But I hope they will stay away. I have several reasons.—Yours ever, Violet."

Miss Grimshaw had several very good reasons to make her desire seclusion for herself and the family which she had taken under her wing. I say "taken under her wing" advisedly, for since the day of her arrival at Drumgool she had been steadily extending the protection of her practical nature and common sense to her protÉgÉs.

In a hundred ways too small for mention in a romance of this description she had interfered in domestic matters. Mrs. Driscoll, for instance, no longer boiled clothes in the soup kettle, prodding them at intervals with the pastry roller, and Norah no longer swept the carpets under the sofas, lit the fires with letters left on the mantel-piece, or emptied pails out of the windows; and these sanitary reforms had been compassed with no loss of goodwill on the part of the reformed towards the reformer.

She had emancipated Effie from her bondage to an imaginary disease, and she had pointed out to French the way he should go, and the methods he should use in carrying out his assault on what, to a lower order of mind than Miss Grimshaw's, would have seemed the impossible.

Common sense of the highest order sometimes allies itself to what common sense of a lower order would deem lunacy. When this alliance takes place, sometimes great and world-shaking events occur.

French had conceived the splendid idea of winning a great English race with an unknown horse in the face of debts, enemies and training disabilities. Miss Grimshaw had, with misgivings enough, brought him the aid of her practical nature. The first move in the game had been made; the knight's gambit had been played; Garryowen had been hopped over three squares and landed in Sussex; nothing threatened him for the moment, and Miss Grimshaw's mind, turned from the big pieces, was now occupied with pawns.

Norah was a pawn. She had a grand-aunt living in Cloyne, and should she forsake The Martens and return, driven by home-sickness, to the roof of her grand-aunt, the game might very easily be lost. Mr. Giveen, who had inklings of French's debt, would discover, by hook or by crook, the Sussex address, and when Lewis' man arrived to find Drumgool empty, the information he would receive from Giveen would be fatal as a loaded gun in the hands of an unerring marksman. Mrs. Driscoll was another pawn in a dangerous position; but the small pieces most engaging the attention of our chess-player at the moment were literally small pieces—half-crowns and shillings.

She had carefully worked out the money problem with Mr. French, and, allowing for everything, and fifty pounds over, to take them back to Ireland, in case of disaster, there was barely three pounds a week left to bring them up to the second week of April.

"Oh, bother the money!" French would say. "It's not the money I'm thinking of."

"Yes, but it's what I'm thinking of. We must be economical. We should have travelled here third-class, not first. You sent that order to Mr. Dashwood's wine merchant for all that champagne and stuff."

"I did, I know, but that won't have to be paid for a year."

"Well, it will have to be paid some time. However, I don't mind that so much. What is frightening me is the small amount of actual money in hand. We have four months before us, and only a little over sixty pounds for that four months. Now, I want to propose something."

"Yes?"

"It's this. Why not give me that sixty pounds to keep and pay the expenses out of? If you keep it, it will be gone in a month."

Mr. French scratched his head. Then he laughed.

"Faith, perhaps you're right," said he.

"I know I am right. It is only by saving and scraping that we will tide over these four months. Now you have that money in the bank. We calculated that it will just cover your racing expenses; the money you will require for bringing the horse to Colonel What's-his-name's stable at Epsom before the race, the money you will require for backing the horse—in fact, for the whole business—leaving fifty pounds over in case of disaster."

"Yes."

"Well, I want you to lock your cheque-book up in a drawer and give me the key, and promise not to touch that money on any account."

"I won't touch it," said French, with the air of a schoolboy making a resolution about apples.

"I know that's what you say and feel now; but there are temptations, and it is vital that you should be out of the way of temptation. You remember Jason, and how he stopped his ears with wax not to hear the songs of the sirens?"

"Faith," said French in a tender tone, "if the sirens' voices were as sweet as——"

He checked himself.

"That may be," said Miss Grimshaw hurriedly, "but, sweet or not sweet, there are always voices calling for money; even coming through London a five-pound note went on nothing. So you must, please, put that cheque-book in a drawer and lock it, and give me the key. Will you do this?"

"I will, I will. The thing's all right, but if you want it done, I'll do it."

"Well, let's do it now, then."

"I will in a minute, when I've seen Moriarty——"

"No; now. There's nothing like doing things at the moment."

"Well, all right," said French. "Let's do it now."

He produced his cheque-book from his desk, and Miss Grimshaw locked it up in the drawer of an escritoire.

"And now," said she, "how about that sixty pounds?"

The badgered one produced a pocket-book and took three twenty-pound notes from it.

"That leaves me only three pounds ten," said he, taking the coins from his waistcoat pocket and exhibiting them as he handed over the notes.

Miss Grimshaw cast a hungry eye on the gold.

"When that's gone," said she, "I will have to allow you pocket money out of my household expenses. We are in exactly the position of shipwrecked people on a raft, with only a certain amount of food and water, and when people are in that condition the first thing they have to do is to put themselves on a strict allowance. I want you," said Miss Grimshaw, "to feel that you are on a raft—and it might be much worse. You have a house for which we have to pay no rent. You have wine and all that which need not be paid for yet. How about cigars and tobacco?"

"Oh, there's lots of smokes," said French rather drearily. "And Bewlays know me, and I can get anything I want on credit—only I'm thinking——"

"Yes?"

"There may be other expenses. In a place like this people are sure to call, and how about if they want to play bridge, or——"

"Don't let's think of it," said the girl. "Bother! Why couldn't it have been summer?"

"They play bridge in summer as well as winter."

"Yes, I suppose they do. But the fools spend their energy on tennis as well, and that makes the disease less acute. Well, if you have to play bridge, I'll try to find the money for it somehow, even if I have to keep the household on oatmeal. What other expenses are likely to turn up?"

"There's sure to be subscriptions and things. And, see here. If we're invited out, we'll have to return any hospitality we receive."

Visions of Mrs. Driscoll's fantastic cookery, crossed by visions of big bills from Benoist, rose before Miss Grimshaw's mind, but she was not a person to be easily cast down.

"If they do, we'll manage somehow. We have wine, and that's the biggest item. Besides"—a brilliant inspiration seized her—"I'm only the governess. People won't call on me. You are really in the position of a bachelor, so you'll only have to invite men."

Mr. French looked troubled for a moment, then he said, "I was going to have told you something."

He stopped and lit a cigarette.

"Well?"

"Dashwood——"

"Well?"

"Well, he said—in fact, he said that these old English folk round here are such a lot of stuck-up old fools that, as a matter of fact, you'd have a bad time here as a governess. So he said that he said to a man that lives here I was bringing my niece with me. D'you see?"

Miss Grimshaw laughed. She knew at once what French meant. Over in clean Ireland no one thought anything of a pretty young governess living in the house of a widower and looking after his daughter; but here it was different. The morals of the rabbit-hutch, which are the morals of English society, had to be conformed to. She had never thought of the matter before, and lo and behold! Bobby Dashwood had thought of the matter for her.

"But I'm not your niece," said Miss Grimshaw.

"No," said French, "but, sure, you might be. And how are they to know? Lot of old fools, they think the position of a governess beneath them—not that you are a governess. Sure," finished he, apologetic and laughing, "we're all at sixes and sevens, and the easiest way out is to cut the knot and claim kinship. I don't know but one of the Frenches mayn't have married some of your people in the past."

"That would scarcely make me your niece. Anyhow, I don't care, only the servants——"

"Faith, and it's little the servants will say. They're dead-set against the English folk, and won't have a word with them. Only this morning I heard Mrs. Driscoll with a chap that had come round selling vegetables. 'Away with you,' says she, 'or I'll set the dog on you, coming round to my back door with your turnips and your rubbish!' The sight of an English face sets her off going like an alarm clock. But little I care about that, so long as she doesn't go off herself."

"Well, then, I'll go now and see what Effie's doing and how the servants are getting on. Mr. Dashwood is coming down for the week-end, is he not?"

"Yes; he'll be down on Friday."

"The great comfort about him," said she, "is that he takes us just as we are, and there's no trouble or expense with him."

She left the room. It was the second morning of their stay at The Martens, and before going to look after Effie and the servants she passed out on the verandah and stood there for a moment, looking at the winter landscape and then down at the houses of the Crowsnesters.

She felt dimly antagonistic to the people who lived in those comfortable-looking, red-tiled houses set about with gardens. She fancied women sitting by those fires whose smoke curled up in thin wreaths through the winter air, women who would cast their noses up at the idea of a governess, and their heads and eyes after their noses at the idea of a supposititious "niece." She imagined gentlemen addicted to bridge who would drain, perhaps, her narrow resources.

One thing pleased her. The neighbourhood looked prosperous, and the charitable appeals, she thought, could not be very exacting. On this she reckoned without the knowledge that a large amount of English charity begins and ends abroad.

Then she turned, and, still delaying before going to see after the servants and Effie, she passed round to the stableyard.

Andy, who was passing across the yard with a bucket in his hand, touched his cap, put down the bucket, and with a grin on his face, but without a word, opened the upper door of the loose-box that held the treasure and pride of the Frenches.

Scarcely had he done so than the sharp sound of horse-hoofs on flags was heard, and a lovely picture framed itself in the doorway—the head of Garryowen.

Leaving aside the beauty of women, surely above all things beautiful and sentient the head of a beautiful horse is supreme. Where else in the animal kingdom will you find such grace, such sensitiveness, such delicacy, combined with strength? Where else, even in the faces of men, such soul?

Even in the faces of men! The girl thought of the faces of the men she had come across in life, and she contrasted those heads, stamped with dulness, with greed, with business, or with pleasure—she contrasted these images of God with the finely chiselled, benign, and beautiful head of Garryowen.

Could it be possible that Mr. Giveen would have the impudence to call Garryowen a lower animal?

Even Andy's "mug" looked like the mask of a gargoyle by contrast, as she turned from the loose-box and made her way back to the house.