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 The papers went up in a burst of flame. The stove worked perfectly.

The two women looked at each other. "Will you tell him, then?" asked Mary.

"Yes . . . Krylenko will tell him. I don't know him at all."

Suddenly Mary kissed the older woman on the cheek. It was an odd, grotesque gesture, which failed of all response. It was like kissing a piece of marble to kiss a woman like Irene Shane.

"Thank you, Irene," she said.

Irene ignored the speech, and turned to the old negro. "Clean the room out, Hennery. There's a Mr. Downes coming here to paint now and then."

"What? Pitchers?" asked Hennery.

"Yes, pictures. He's to come and go as he likes. You needn't worry about him."

They left him raising clouds of dust with a worn stable-broom. It did not strike him that there was anything extraordinary in the arrangement. He had come to Shane's Castle a buck nigger of eighteen, when John Shane was a bachelor. He was sixty-five now. Anything, he knew, might happen at Shane's Castle. Life there possessed a sort of subterranean excitement.

As he swept he kept thinking that Miss Lily was already on her way home from Paris, coming to see her Mammy die. She hadn't been home in seven years. When Miss Lily came home, everything was changed. All the excitement seemed to rise above the surface, and all life changed and became a tingling, splendiferous affair. Even the presence of death in the Castle couldn't dampen the effect of Miss Lily.