Dr. Mangan drove home as swiftly and capably as was his wont.  It had been fair-day in Cluhir, and the people from the country were slowly and reluctantly forsaking the enjoyments of the town.  Large women piled voluminously on small carts, each with a conducting little boy and a labouring little donkey somewhere beneath her; men in decent blue cloth garments, whose innate respectability must have suffered acutely from the erratic conduct of the limbs inside them; wandering knots of cattle, remotely attended by the wearers of blue cloth aforesaid; horses carting themselves and their owners home, with entire self-control and good sense; and, anchored in the tide of traffic, the ubiquitous beggar-women, their filthy hands proffering matches, green apples, bootlaces, their strident tongues mastering the noises of the street, their rapacious, humorous eyes observant of all things.  All these did Dr. Mangan encounter and circumvent, frustrating their apparent determination to commit suicide by those diverse methods of abuse, cajolery, and, on the part of the car, mechanical activity, that formed an important part of the necessary equipment of an Irish motorist of the earlier time.  Nevertheless, the more intimate portion of his brain was deeply engaged in those labyrinths of minor provincial intrigue in which so many able intellects spend themselves, for want of wider opportunity.

Mrs. Mangan was in the kitchen, where, indeed, she was not infrequently to be found, when the Doctor came in by the back-door from the yard.

“I want you, Annie,” he said, shouldering his enormous bulk along the narrow passage, and treading heavily on the cat, who, her mystic meditations thus painfully interrupted, vanished in darkness, uttering the baleful cry of her kind, that is so inherently opposed to the blended forgiveness and apology that give poignancy to a dog’s reproach for a similar injury.

“Look here, Annie.  Before I forget it, I want you to take the car on Saturday—­I’ll want it myself to-morrow—­and call upon Miss Coppinger.  Barty can drive you.  I got a wire awhile ago, and I have to go on the nine o’clock to-night to Broadhaven.  It’s that unfortunate Prendergast the Member.  There’s nothing can be done for the poor fellow, but whether or no, I must go.”

“They’ll not be satisfied till they have you dead, too, dragging at you!” protested Mrs. Mangan.  “What nonsense they have, and you there only this morning!  On earth, what can you do more for him?”

“They think more of me, my dear, than you do!” said the Doctor, cheerfully.  “Be listening, now, to what I’m saying.  You’re to be as civil as be damned to old Frederica, and tell Barty he’s to fix up with Larry to come here—­what day is this to-day is?  Thursday?—­Tell him I’ll be in on Sunday afternoon, and I want to talk to him on very special business.  Now, will you remember that?”

He repeated his commands, as people will who have learnt, as most Doctors must learn, the fallibility of the human memory and its infinite powers of invention and substitution.