In two palpitating journeys we removed from the dining-room our belongings, and placed them in the kitchen; silence, fraught with dire possibilities, still brooded over the drawing-room.  Could they all be asleep, or was Miss McEvoy watching us through the keyhole?  There remained only my hat, which was upstairs, and at this, the last moment, Robert remembered his fly-book, left under the clock in the dining-room.  I again passed the drawing-room in safety, and got upstairs, Robert effecting at the same moment his third entry into the dining-room.  I was in the act of thrusting in the second hat pin when I heard the drawing-room door open.  I admit that, obeying the primary instinct of self-preservation, my first impulse was to lock myself in; it passed, aided by the recollection that there was no key.  I made for the landing, and from thence viewed, in a species of trance, Miss McEvoy crossing the hall and entering the dining-room.  A long and deathly pause followed.  She was a small woman; had Robert strangled her?  After two or three horrible minutes a sound reached me, the well-known rattle of the side-board drawer.  All then was well—­Miss McEvoy was probably looking for the biscuits, and Robert must have escaped in time through the window.  I took my courage in both hands and glided downstairs.  As I placed my foot on the oilcloth of the hall, I was confronted by the nightmare spectacle of my brother creeping towards me on all-fours through the open door of the dining-room, and then, crowning this already over-loaded moment, there arose a series of yells from Miss McEvoy as blood-curdling as they were excusable, yet, as even in my maniac flight to the kitchen I recognised, something muffled by Marie biscuit.

It seems to me that the next incident was the composite and shattering collision of Robert, Julia and myself in the scullery doorway, followed by the swift closing of the scullery-door upon us by Julia; then the voice of the Dean of Glengad, demanding from the house at large an explanation, in a voice of cathedral severity.  Miss McEvoy’s reply was to us about as coherent as the shrieks of a parrot, but we plainly heard Julia murmur in the kitchen:—­

“May the devil choke ye!”

Then again the Dean, this time near the kitchen door.  “Julia!  Where is the man who was secreted under the dinner-table?”

I gripped Robert’s arm.  The issues of life and death were now in Julia’s hands.

“Is it who was in the dining-room, your Reverence?” asked Julia, in tones of respectful honey; “sure that was the carpenter’s boy, that came to quinch a rat-hole.  Sure we’re destroyed with rats.”

“But,” pursued the Dean, raising his voice to overcome Miss McEvoy’s continuous screams of explanation to Mrs. Doherty, “I understand that he left the room on his hands and knees.  He must have been drunk!”

“Ah, not at all, your Reverence,” replied Julia, with almost compassionate superiority, “sure that poor boy is the gentlest crayture ever came into a house.  I suppose ’tis what it was he was ashamed like when Miss McEvoy comminced to screech, and faith he never stopped nor stayed till he ran out of the house like a wild goose!”