The dining-room (the sedate original of my father’s rather garish copy) was a panelled chamber, hung round with rubicund portraits of the male O’Neills from the early ones of the family who had been Lords of Ellan down to the “bad Lord Raa,” who had sworn at my grandmother on the high road.

I felt as if no woman could have made her home here for at least a hundred years, and I thought the general atmosphere of the house was that of the days when spendthrift noblemen, making the island a refuge from debt, spent their days in gambling and their nights in drinking bumpers from bowls of whiskey punch to the nameless beauties they had left “in town.”

They were all gone, all dead as the wood of the worm-eaten wainscotting, but the sound of their noisy merry-making seemed to cling to the rafters still, and as I went up to my rooms the broad oaken staircase seemed to be creaking under their drunken footsteps.

My own apartments, to which Lady Margaret conducted me, were on the southern side of the house—­a rather stuffy bedroom with walls covered by a kind of pleated chintz, and a boudoir with a stone balcony that had a flight of steps going down to a terrace of the garden, which overlooked a glen and had a far view of the sea.

On the opposite side of the landing outside (which was not immediately off the great staircase though open to the view of it) there was a similar suite of rooms which I thought might be my husband’s, but I was told they were kept for a guest.

Being left alone I had taken off my outer things and was standing on my balcony, listening to the dull hum of the water in the glen, the rustle of the trees above it, the surge of the sea on the rocks below, the creaking of a rusty weathercock and the striking of a court-yard clock, when I also heard the toot and throb of another motor-car, and as soon as it came up I saw that it contained Aunt Bridget in the half-moon bonnet and Betsy Beauty, who was looking more than ever like a country belle.

When I went down to the drawing-room Lady Margaret was pouring out tea for them, and at sight of me Aunt Bridget cried,

“Sakes alive, here she is herself!”

“But how pale and pinched and thin!” said Betsy Beauty.

“Nonsense, girl, that’s only natural,” said my Aunt Bridget, with something like a wink; and then she went on to say that she had just been telling her ladyship that if I felt lonely and a little helpless on first coming home Betsy would be pleased to visit me.

Before I could reply my husband came in, followed shortly by Alma, who was presented as before, as “Mary’s old school-fellow”; and then, while Betsy talked to Alma and my husband to his kinswoman, Aunt Bridget, in an undertone, addressed herself to me.

“You’re that way, aren’t you? . . .  No?  Goodness me, girl, your father will be disappointed!”

Just then a third motor-car came throbbing up to the house, and Betsy who was standing by the window cried: