"May the Lord have mercy on him!" murmured Miss O'Reilly in the background.
"Amen!" growled the old man, taking another pull at his steaming tumbler, as if he were drinking his brother's health. "And look at me here," he went on, reddening slowly through the white stubble on his cheeks, "dying as soft as any owld cow in a boghole, and all they'll be saying afther me is asking would they get their bellyful of whisky at my wake! I tell you this—and let you be listening to me, Joanna!—what hounds Mr. Knox doesn't take, I'll not leave them afther me to be disgraced in the counthry, running rabbits on Sunday afternoons with them poaching blackguards up out of the town! No! But they'll have a stone round their neck and to be thrown below in the lough!"
I thought of the nephew Luke, whose friends had so frequently failed to see him off, and I felt very sorry for old O'Reilly.
"They will, they will, to be sure!" said Miss O'Reilly soothingly, "and look at you now, the way you are! Didn't I know well you had no call to be drinking punch, you that was coughing all night. On the face of God's earth, Mr. Knox, I never heard such a cough! 'Tis like a sheep's cough! I declare it's like the sound of the beating of the drum!"
"Well, Mr. O'Reilly," said Flurry, ignoring these remarkable symptoms, but none the less playing to her lead, "I suppose we might have a look at the hounds now."
"Go, tell Tom to open the tower door," said old O'Reilly to his sister, after a moment's silence. He handed her a key. "And shut the gate you."
As soon as she had gone he got on to his feet. "Mr. Knox, sir," he said, "might I put as much trouble on you as to move out this chair to the door? I'll sit there the way I can see them. Maybe the other gentleman would reach me down the horn that's up on the wall. He's near as tall as meself."
Flurry did as he asked, and helped him across the room.
"Close out the half door if you please, Mr. Knox, and give me the old rug that's there, my feet is destroyed with the rheumatics."
He dropped groaningly into his chair, and I handed him the horn, an old brass one, bent and dinted.