Nearer than that, I can't say. I'm no scholar, my lady."

"But why?" she asked, puzzled. "I don't understand."

"Cut off," he said, stooping over his work.

Flavia turned a shade paler. "Why?" she repeated.

"'One God, and Mahomet His prophet'--couldn't swallow it. One finger!"
the man answered jerkily. "Next week--same. Third week----"

"Third week?" she murmured, shuddering.

"Exchanged."

She lifted her eyes with an effort from his maimed hand. "How many were
you?" she inquired.

"Thirty-four." He laughed drily. "We know one another when we meet," he
said. He drew his waxed thread between his finger and thumb, held it up
to the light, then looked askance at the gossoons about him, to whom
what he said was gibberish. They knew only Erse.

The day was still, the mist lay on the lake, and under it the water
gleamed, a smooth pale mirror. Flavia had seen it so a hundred times,
and thought naught of it. But to-day, moved by what she had heard, the
prospect spoke of a remoteness from the moving world which depressed
her. Hitherto the quick pulse and the energy of youth had left her no
time for melancholy, and not much for thought. If at rare intervals she
had felt herself lonely, if she had been tempted to think that the
brother in whom were centred her hopes, her affections, and her family
pride was hard and selfish, rude and overbearing, she had told herself
that all men were so; that all men rode rough-shod over their women.
And that being so, who had a better right to hector it than the last of
the McMurroughs, heir of the Wicklow kings, who in days far past had
dealt on equal terms with Richard Plantagenet, and to whom, by virtue
of that never-forgotten kingship, the Sullivans and Mahonies, some of
the McCarthys, and all the O'Beirnes, paid rude homage? With such
feelings Sir Michael's strange whim of disinheriting the heir of his
race had but drawn her closer to her brother. To her loyalty the act
was abhorrent, was unnatural, was one that could only have sprung, she
was certain, from second childhood, the dotage of a man close on
ninety, whose early years had been steeped in trouble, and who loved
her so much that he was ready to do wrong for her sake.

Often she differed from her brother. But he was a man, she told
herself; and he must be right--a man's life could not be ruled by the
laws which a woman observed. For the rest, for herself, if her life
seemed solitary she had the free air and the mountains