“He was a dealer, miss,” went on Patsey; “a Dublin fella’.  Sixty-three sovereigns I asked him, and he offered me fifty-five, and a man that was there said we should shplit the differ, and in the latther end he gave me the sixty pounds.  He wasn’t very stiff at all.  I’m thinking he wasn’t buying for himself.”

The man who had noticed Fanny Fitz’s eyes moved away unostentatiously.  He had seen in them as much as he wanted; for that time at least.

THE CONNEMARA MARE

PART I

The grey mare who had been one of the last, if not the very last, of the sales at the Dublin Horse Show, was not at all happy in her mind.

Still less so was the dealer’s under-strapper, to whom fell the task of escorting her through the streets of Dublin.  Her late owner’s groom had assured him that she would “folly him out of his hand, and that whatever she’d see she wouldn’t care for it nor ask to look at it!”

It cannot be denied, however, that when an electric tram swept past her like a terrace under weigh, closely followed by a cart laden with a clanking and horrific reaping-machine, she showed that she possessed powers of observation.  The incident passed off with credit to the under-strapper, but when an animal has to be played like a salmon down the length of Lower Mount Street, and when it barn-dances obliquely along the north side of Merrion Square, the worst may be looked for in Nassau Street.

And it was indeed in Nassau Street, and, moreover, in full view of the bow window of Kildare Street Club, that the cup of the under-strapper’s misfortunes brimmed over.  To be sure he could not know that the new owner of the grey mare was in that window; it was enough for him that a quiescent and unsuspected piano-organ broke with three majestic chords into Mascagni’s “Intermezzo” at his very ear, and that, without any apparent interval of time, he was surmounting a heap composed of a newspaper boy, a sandwich man, and a hospital nurse, while his hands held nothing save a red-hot memory of where the rope had been.  The smashing of glass and the clatter of hoofs on the pavement filled in what space was left in his mind for other impressions.

“She’s into the hat shop!” said Mr. Rupert Gunning to himself in the window of the club, recognising his recent purchase and the full measure of the calamity in one and the same moment.

He also recognised in its perfection the fact, already suspected by him, that he had been a fool.

Upheld by this soothing reflection he went out into the street, where awaited him the privileges of proprietorship.  These began with the despatching of the mare, badly cut, and apparently lame on every leg, in charge of the remains of the under-strapper, to her destination.  They continued with the consolation of the hospital nurse, and embraced in varying pecuniary degrees the compensation of the sandwich man, the newspaper boy, and the proprietor of the hat shop.  During all this time he enjoyed the unfaltering attention of a fair-sized crowd, liberal in comment, prolific of imbecile suggestion.  And all these things were only the beginning of the trouble.