claimed as he deposited the articles
one after another under the seat of the trap with a lofty disregard of
their owner. "'Tis a soft night an' a long road you have before you! Is
it cold the mare is?" He had paused to eye the impatient young animal
before him, with the Irishman's unfailing appreciation of horse-flesh.

Here Milbanke, feeling that some veiled reproof had been suggested, had
broken in upon the monologue.

"I hope I haven't injured the horse by the delay," he had said hastily.
"The train was exactly twenty-two minutes behind its time."

Then for the first time the old coachman had bent down from his lofty
position.

"An', sure, what harm if it was, sir?" he had exclaimed, voicing the
hospitality due to his master's guest. "What hurry is there at all--so
long as it brought you safe?"

"True for you, Tim!" the porter had interjected softly; and seizing
Milbanke's arm, he had swung him into the trap, precisely as he had
swung the luggage a few seconds previously.

"Thank you, sir!" he had murmured a moment later. "Good-night to you!
Good-night, Tim! Safe road!" And, drawing back, he had looked on with
admiration while Burke had gathered up the reins and the mare had
plunged forward into the misty, sea-scented night.

That had been Milbanke's first introduction into the district where he
proposed to spend a week with a man he had not seen for nearly thirty
years.

As the trap moved forward, leaving the straggling town with its
scattered lights far behind, his thoughts--temporarily distracted by
the incidents of his arrival--reverted to the channel in which they had
run during the greater part of the day. Again his mind returned to the
period of his college career when, as a quiet student, he had been
drawn by the subtle attraction of contrast into a friendship with Denis
Asshlin--the young Irishman whose spirit, whose enthusiasms, whose
exuberant joy in life had shone in such vivid colours beside his own
neutral-tinted personality. His thoughts passed methodically from those
eager, early days to the more sober ones that had followed Asshlin's
recall to Ireland, and thence onward over the succeeding tale of years.
He reviewed his own calm, if somewhat lonely, manhood; his aimless
delving first into one branch of learning, then into another; his
gradually dawning interest in the study of archaeology--an interest
that, fostered by ample leisure and ample means, had become the
temperate and well-ordered