l and her affairs,
and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and the
servants, the slipshoddedness and waste going on behind the scenes in the
absence of a master and mistress.

Pinckney loathed waste as he loathed inefficiency and as he loathed dirt.
They were all three brothers with Drink in his eyes and as he leaned back
in the chair now, his gaze travelling about the room, he could not but
perceive little things that would have brought exclamations from the soul
of a careful housekeeper. The furniture had been upholstered, or rather
re-upholstered in leather some five years ago. There is nothing that cries
out so much against neglect as leather, and the chairs and couch in the
library of Kilgobbin, without exactly crying out, still told their tale.
Some of the buttons were gone, and some of them hung actually by the
thread in the last stage of departure. There was a tiny triangular rent in
the leather of the armchair wherein Phyl had been sitting and another
armchair wanted a castor. The huge Persian rug that covered the centre of
the floor shewed marks left by cigar and cigarette ash, and under a
Jacobean book-case in the corner were stuffed all sorts of odds and ends,
old paper-backed novels, a pair of old shoes, a tennis racquet and a
boxing glove--besides other things.

Pinckney rose up, went to the book-case and placed his fingers on top of
it, then he looked at his fingers and the bar of dust upon them, brushed
his hand clean and came back to his chair by the fire. He heard the stable
clock striking eleven. The sound of the wind that had been raging outside
all during dinner time had died away and the sounds of the house made
themselves manifest, the hundred stealthy accountable and unaccountable
little sounds that night evolves from an old house set in the stillness of
the country. Just as the night jasmine gives up its perfume to the night,
so does an old house its past in the form of murmurs and crackings and
memories and suggestions. Notwithstanding Dunn's attentions there were
rats alive in the cellars and under the boarding--and mice; the passages
leading to the kitchen premises made a whispering gallery where murderers
seemed consulting together if the scullery window were forgotten and left
open--as it usually was, and boards in the uneven flooring that had been
preparing for the act for weeks and months would suddenly "go off with a
bang," a noise startling in the dead of night a