ne of them, took her place in the window-seat and
pressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the clouds
had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could
just make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement of
the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind.

The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out
by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in
their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was
thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father.

Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in
Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will
and he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though it
were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things
with never a word of Him.

If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps,
this silence of Pinckney's was the silence of delicacy, not of
indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light
of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes
came to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it.

She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him.

What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative to
stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of the
world, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the
few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were
separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two
opposing camps--Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others
Papists.

Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthen
against the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its light
increasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, the
leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon
stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the
great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen
mysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids' altar.

The Druids' altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vast
slab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, but
popular imagination had hung it about