A door opened somewhere upstairs, and: 

“Is that yoursel’, Dan?” inquired a deep but musical female voice.

“Sure it is,” replied Kerry; and no one who had heard the high official tones of the imperious Chief Inspector would have supposed that they could be so softened and modulated.  “You should have been asleep hours ago, Mary.”

“Have ye to go out again?”

“I have, bad luck; but don’t trouble to come down.  I’ve all I want and more.”

“If ’tis a new case I’ll come down.”

“It’s the devil’s own case; but you’ll get your death of cold.”

Sounds of movement in the room above followed, and presently footsteps on the stairs.  Mrs. Kerry, enveloped in a woollen dressing-gown, which obviously belonged to the Inspector, came into the room.  Upon her Kerry directed a look from which all fierceness had been effaced, and which expressed only an undying admiration.  And, indeed, Mary Kerry was in many respects a remarkable character.  Half an inch taller than Kerry, she fully merited the compliment designed by that trite apothegm, “a fine woman.”  Large-boned but shapely, as she came in with her long dark hair neatly plaited, it seemed to her husband—­who had remained her lover—­that he saw before him the rosy-cheeked lass whom ten years before he had met and claimed on the chilly shores of Loch Broom.  By all her neighbors Mrs. Kerry was looked upon as a proud, reserved person, who had held herself much aloof since her husband had become Chief Inspector; and the reputation enjoyed by Red Kerry was that of an aggressive and uncompanionable man.  Now here was a lover’s meeting, not lacking the shy, downward glance of dark eyes as steel-blue eyes flashed frank admiration.

Kerry, who quarrelled with everybody except the Assistant Commissioner, had only found one cause of quarrel with Mary.  He was a devout Roman Catholic, and for five years he had clung with the bull-dog tenacity which was his to the belief that he could convert his wife to the faith of Rome.  She remained true to the Scottish Free Church, in whose precepts she had been reared, and at the end of the five years Kerry gave it up and admired her all the more for her Caledonian strength of mind.  Many and heated were the debates he had held with worthy Father O’Callaghan respecting the validity of a marriage not solemnized by a priest, but of late years he had grown reconciled to the parting of the ways on Sunday morning; and as the early mass was over before the Scottish service he was regularly to be seen outside a certain Presbyterian chapel waiting for his heretical spouse.

He pulled her down on to his knee and kissed her.

“It’s twelve hours since I saw you,” he said.

She rested her arm on the back of the saddle-back chair, and her dark head close beside Kerry’s fiery red one.

“I kenned ye had a new case on,” she said, “when it grew so late.  How long can ye stay?”