She slackened the reins, and the thirsty colt eagerly thrust his muzzle into the water.  As he did so he took another forward step, and instantly, with a terrific splash, he and his rider were floundering in brown water up to his withers in the ditch below the submerged edge of the road.  To Muriel’s credit it, must be said that she bore this unlooked-for immersion with the nerve of a Baptist convert.  In a second she had pulled the colt round parallel with the bank, and in another she had hurled herself from the saddle and was dragging herself, like a wounded otter, up on to the level of the road.

“Well you’ve done it now, Muriel!” said Nora dispassionately.  “How pleased Sir Thomas will be when the colt begins to cough to-morrow morning!  He’s bound to catch cold out of this.  Look out!  Here’s that man that went the run with us.  I’d try and wipe some of the mud off my face if I were you!”

A younger sister of fifteen is not apt to err on the side of over sympathy, but the deficiencies of Nora were more than made up for by the solicitude of the stranger with the pointed beard.  He hauled the colt from his watery nest, he dried him down with handfuls of rushes, he wiped the saddle with his own beautiful silk pocket-handkerchief.  For a stranger he displayed—­so it struck Nora—­a surprising knowledge of the locality.  He pointed out that Mount Purcell was seven miles away, and that the village of Drinagh, where he was putting up—­("Oho! so he’s the inspector Sir Thomas was going to be so civil to!” thought the younger Miss Purcell with an inward grin)—­was only two or three miles away.

“You know, Nora,” said Muriel with an unusually conciliatory manner, “it isn’t at all out of our way, and the colt ought to get a proper rub down and a hot drink.”

“I should have thought he’d had about as much to drink as he wanted, hot or cold!” said Nora.

But Nora had not been a younger sister for fifteen years for nothing, and it was for Drinagh that the party steered their course.

Their arrival stirred McKeown’s Hotel (so-called) to its depths.  Destiny had decreed that Mrs. McKeown, being, as she expressed it, “an epicure about boots,” should choose this day of all others to go to “town” to buy herself a pair, leaving the direction of the hotel in the hands of her husband, a person of minor importance, and of Mary Ann Whooly, a grey-haired kitchen-maid, who milked the cows and made the beds, and at a distance in the back-yard was scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding heaps of manure.

[Illustration:  “THE GREY-HAIRED KITCHEN-MAID.”]

The Inspector’s hospitality knew no limits, and failed to recognise that those of McKeown’s Hotel were somewhat circumscribed.  He ordered hot whisky and water, mutton chops, dry clothes for Miss Purcell, fires, tea, buttered toast, poached eggs and other delicacies simultaneously and immediately, and the voice of Mary Ann Whooly imploring Heaven’s help for herself and its vengeance upon her inadequate assistants was heard far in the streets of Drinagh.