Upon one point all were agreed:  Mr. Paul Dangerfield lay in the county gaol, on a charge of having assaulted Dr. Sturk with intent to kill him.  The women blessed themselves, and turned pale.  The men looked queer when they met one another.  It was altogether so astounding—­Mr. Dangerfield was so rich—­so eminent—­so moral—­so charitable—­so above temptation.  It had come out that he had committed, some said three, others as many as fifteen secret murders.  All the time that the neighbours had looked on his white head in church as the very standard of probity, and all the prudential virtues rewarded, they were admiring and honouring a masked assassin.  They had been bringing into their homes and families an undivulged and terrible monster.  The wher-wolf had walked the homely streets of their village.  The ghoul, unrecognised, had prowled among the graves of their church-yard.  One of their fairest princesses, the lady of Belmont, had been on the point of being sacrificed to a vampire.  Horror, curiosity, and amazement, were everywhere.

Charles Nutter, it was rumoured, was to be discharged on bail early, and it was mooted in the club that a deputation of the neighbours should ride out to meet him at the boundaries of Chapelizod, welcome him there with an address, and accompany him to the Mills as a guard of honour; but cooler heads remembered the threatening and unsettled state of things at that domicile, and thought that Nutter would, all things considered, like a quiet return best; which view of the affair was, ultimately, acquiesced in.

For Mary Matchwell, at the Mills, the tidings which had thrown the town into commotion had but a solitary and a selfish interest.  She was glad that Nutter was exculpated.  She had no desire that the king should take his worldly goods to which she intended helping herself:  otherwise he might hang or drown for ought she cared.  Dirty Davy, too, who had quaked about his costs, was greatly relieved by the turn which things had taken; and the plain truth was that, notwithstanding his escape from the halter, things looked very black and awful for Charles Nutter and his poor little wife, Sally.

Doctor Toole, at half-past nine, was entertaining two or three of the neighbours, chiefly in oracular whispers, by the fire in the great parlour of the Phoenix, when he was interrupted by Larry, the waiter, with—­

‘Your horse is at the door, docther’ (Toole was going into town, but was first to keep an appointment at Doctor Sturk’s with Mr. Lowe), ‘and,’ continued Larry, ’there’s a fat gentleman in the blue room wants to see you, if you plase.’

‘Hey?—­ho! let’s see then,’ said little Toole, bustling forth with an important air.  ‘The blue room, hey?’

When he opened the door of that small apartment there stood a stout, corpulent, rather seedy and dusty personage, at the window, looking out and whistling with his hat on.  He turned lazily about as Toole entered, and displayed the fat and forbidding face of Dirty Davy.