Poor Mrs. Sturk meanwhile, in the House by the Church-yard, sat listening and wondering, and plying her knitting-needles in the drawing-room.  When the hour of her Barney’s expected return had passed some time, she sent down to the barrack, and then to the club, and then on to the King’s House, with her service to Mrs. Stafford, to enquire, after her spouse.  But her first and her second round of enquiries, despatched at the latest minute at which she was likely to find any body out of bed to answer them, were altogether fruitless.  And the lights went out in one house after another, and the Phoenix shut its doors, and her own servants were for hours gone to bed; and the little town of Chapelizod was buried in the silence of universal slumber.  And poor Mrs. Sturk still sat in her drawing-room, more and more agitated and frightened.

But her missing soldier did not turn up, and Leonora sat and listened hour after hour.  No sound of return, not even the solemn clank and fiery snort of the fiend-horse under her window, or the ’ho-lo, ho-la—­my life, my love!’ of the phantom rider, cheated her with a momentary hope.

Poor Mrs. Sturk!  She raised the window a few inches, that she might the better hear the first distant ring of his coming on the road.  She forgot he had not his horse that night, and was but a pedestrian.  But somehow the night-breeze through the aperture made a wolfish howling and sobbing, that sounded faint and far away, and had a hateful character of mingled despair and banter in it.

She said every now and then aloud, to reassure herself—­’What a noise the wind makes to be sure!’ and after a while she opened the window wider.  But her candle flared, and the flame tossed wildly about, and the perplexed lady feared it might go out absolutely.  So she shut down the window altogether; for she could not bear the ill-omened baying any longer.

So it grew to be past two o’clock, and she was afraid that Barney would be very angry with her for sitting up, should he return.

She went to bed, therefore, where she lay only more feverish—­conjecturing, and painting frightful pictures, till she heard the crow of the early village cock, and the caw of the jackdaw wheeling close to the eaves as he took wing in the gray of the morning to show her that the business of a new day had commenced; and yet Barney had not returned.

Not long after seven o’clock, Dr. Toole, with Juno, Caesar, Dido, and Sneak at his heels, paid his half-friendly, half-professional visit at the Mills.

Poor little Mrs. Nutter was much better—­quiet for her was everything, packed up, of course, with a little physic; and having comforted her, as well as he was able, he had a talk with Moggy in the hall, and all about Nutter’s disappearance, and how Mrs. Macan saw him standing by the river’s brink, and that was the last anyone near the house had seen of him; and a thought flashed upon Toole, and he was very near coming out with it, but checked himself, and only said—­