A flock of wild geese flying across the sunset far away, remote, fantastic, the only living things visible in a world filling with shadows, lent the last touch of beauty to the vast and lonely moors.

“They’re makin’ for the pools of Cloyne, sir,” said the keeper.

Mr Fanshawe watched the flock pass and vanish in the amber distance like a wreath of smoke. Away to the left, covering themselves with night and gloom, stood the hills of Glynn, where the golden eagle still has its eyrie, and the wild goat its home. From there, away to the west, the great moors stretched to the hills of Cloyne.

It was a typical Irish winter’s evening, the sky threatening and forgetting to rain, the air damp and filled with the scent of the earth, near things indistinct in the gathering twilight, and far things seeming near.

From where Mr Fanshawe stood, with his pipe in his mouth and his gun under his arm, you might have started with a brave heart to walk to the hills of Cloyne. Ten miles distant, or at most twelve, they seemed, those hills that lay thirty Irish miles away.

Fanshawe was staying for the hunting with Mr Trench of Dunboyne House. He had come out to-day to have a shot at the snipe, and he had not done badly, to judge by the weight of the bag Micky Finn, the old keeper, was carrying.

“Well,” said the young man, refilling and lighting his pipe, “we’d better be getting back. How far are we from the house, Micky?”

“A matter of five mile be the boggs, sir, an’ siven be the road; which way would your ’arner be chusin’ to take?”

“The road,” said Mr Fanshawe, and, followed by Micky and the dogs, he struck towards the high-road from Dunbeg which goes across the moors white and straight like a chalk-line drawn by a giant.

“You were afther askin’ me, sir, what time the letters came from Dunbeg,” said Micky, as they stepped on to the highway. “Here’s Larry and the letters now, comin’ as hard as he can pelt two hours late, the blackguyard! He’s been stoppin’ to drink at Billy Sheehan’s, or colloguing wid the girls; musha, but it’s little he cares who waits for their letters whin the bottle’s before him.”

Mr Fanshawe shaded his eyes, and with a constriction of the heart watched the horseman and the horse coming at a furious pace and developing with magical speed against the sunset. The sound of the hoofs, like the sound of castanets in the hands of a madman, came on the breeze.

The horseman, a ragged individual with a leer on his face, no boots on his feet, and a post-bag slung on his back, reined in when he came level with the keeper and the gentleman, bringing his horse literally on its haunches.

“Any letters for Mr Fanshawe, Larry?” asked the keeper.

“Begob!” said Larry, swinging the post-bag round and opening it, “there’s letters enough for a dozen, but I’m no schollard to tell yiz who thir for; will y’ be afther puttin’ your hand in the bag, sir, and takin’ your chice?”

Mr Fanshawe did as he was invited. There was only one letter for him, all the rest were for Mr Trench or members of his household.

It was not the letter he had been half expecting by every post for weeks and weeks past, and he opened it with a gloomy brow, and read it by the light of sunset as Larry rode on and the sound of the hoofs died away on the high-road.

To be young, rich, healthy, good-looking, and yet unhappy! No other magician but Love could bring about such an extraordinary concatenation of states.

Love had done this in the case of Mr Fanshawe.

As for the letter, it was addressed from Glen Druid House, Tullagh, Mid Meath, and it ran:

“Dear Richard,—I have only just been informed that you are staying with my friends the Trenches, to whom, through you, I send my very kind regards.

“This house is only some forty miles from where you are now, and as I have a small house-party coming on the 10th, the happy idea has occurred to me that you might join us, if your engagements will permit you so to do. You will find shooting enough to please you, I think, in the coverts, and the O’Farrel’s hounds meet twice a week. You will also find a sincere welcome from your old friend,

“P.S.—I am here, at present, by myself. I would be quite alone were it not that I have your cousin Robert’s children staying with me. Bob (Lord Gawdor), Doris, and Selina my namesake.”

“Bother the children!” said Mr Fanshawe, thrusting the letter into the pocket of his shooting coat, and little dreaming what pleasant factors in the making of his fate those same children were to be.

He was rather fond of children, as a matter of fact, but he was in love, and he had been deciphering Lady Seagrave’s old-fashioned caligraphy in the hope of finding, like a flower in a wilderness, the magical name of Violet Lestrange.

“Do you know anything of Glen Druid House, near Tullagh, Micky?” he asked, as they trudged along together in the deepening twilight.

“Yes, sor,” replied Micky; “it’s be Castle Knock over beyant thim hills. It was Mr Moriarty’s in the ould days. The place went to rot an’ ruin whin the ould gintleman died, but they do be tellin’ me it’s changed hands to an ould lady from over the wather.”

“Is there good shooting?”

“Shutin’!” said Micky, speaking more from a desire to be amiable than from absolute knowledge. “Sure, it’s not a gun you’d want there at all, at all, for you could knock the cock phisints down wid your fist. Phisints! ay, be jabers! an’ woodcock an’ teal; and as for hares an’ rabbits, the groun’s is jumpin’ an’ runnin’ wid them.”

“If nothing better turns up,” said Mr Fanshawe to himself, “I’m not sure that I won’t accept the old girl’s invitation;” and ten days later, as you may have guessed from this preamble, he did.