A covered car is a vehicle peculiar to the south of Ireland; it resembles a two-wheeled waggonette with a windowless black box on top of it.  Its mouth is at the back, and it has the sinister quality of totally concealing its occupants until the irrevocable moment when it is turned and backed against your front door steps.  For this moment my brother Robert and I did not wait.  A short passage and a flight of steps separated us from the kitchen; beyond the steps, and facing the kitchen door, a door opened into the garden.  Robert slipped up heavily in the passage as we fled, but gained the garden door undamaged.  The hall door bell pealed at my ear; I caught a glimpse of Julia, pounding chops with the rolling pin.

“Say we’re out,” I hissed to her—­“gone out for the day!  We are going into the garden!”

“Sure ye needn’t give yerself that much trouble,” replied Julia affably, as she snatched a grimy cap off a nail.

Nevertheless, in spite of the elasticity of Julia’s conscience, the garden seemed safer.

In the garden, a plot of dense and various vegetation, decorated with Julia’s lingerie, we awaited the sound of the departing wheels.  But nothing departed.  The breathless minutes passed, and then, through the open drawing-room window, we were aware of strange voices.  The drawing-room window overlooked the garden thoroughly and commandingly.  There was not a moment to lose.  We plunged into the raspberry canes, and crouched beneath their embowered arches, and the fulness of the situation began to sink into our souls.

Through the window we caught a glimpse of a white beard and a portly black suit, of a black bonnet and a dolman that glittered with jet, of yet another black bonnet.

With Aunt Dora’s house we had taken on, as it were, her practice, and the goodwill of her acquaintance.  The Dean of Glengad and Mrs. Doherty were the very apex and flower of the latter, and in the party now installed in Aunt Dora’s drawing-room I unhesitatingly recognised them, and Mrs. Doherty’s sister, Miss McEvoy.  Miss McEvoy was an elderly lady of the class usually described as being “not all there”.  The expression, I imagine, implies a regret that there should not be more.  As, however, what there was of Miss McEvoy was chiefly remarkable for a monstrous appetite and a marked penchant for young men, it seems to me mainly to be regretted that there should be as much of her as there is.

A drive of nine miles in the heat of a June morning is not undertaken without a sustaining expectation of luncheon at the end of it.  There were in the house three mutton chops to meet that expectation.  I communicated all these facts to my brother.  The consternation of his face, framed in raspberry boughs, was a picture not to be lightly forgotten.  At such a moment, with everything depending on sheer nerve and resourcefulness, to consign Julia to perdition was mere self-indulgence on his part, but I suppose it was inevitable.  Here the door into the garden opened and Julia came forth, with a spotless apron and a face of elaborate unconcern.  She picked a handful of parsley, her black eyes questing for us among the bushes; they met mine, and a glance more alive with conspiracy it has not been my lot to receive.  She moved desultorily towards us, gathering green gooseberries in her apron.