Dick Talbot-Lowry received this announcement with the mixture of indignation and contempt that might have been anticipated from an old-established Pterodactyl, who has been warned that his hereditary wallow in the Primeval Ooze is about to be wrested from him.  Having expressed these sentiments in suitable language, he said, lightly, that Fairfax must raise as much on the property as would keep these Dublin sharks quiet, and in the meantime he would shut up the house at once and go to London.  Temporary retrenchment was all that was required.  He would let the place.  Some rich Englishman would jump at the chance—­

Major Dick had that optimism about his own affairs that is often combined with a tranquil pessimism about the affairs of others.  He said that all he wanted was to get clear of the blood-sucking swarm of hangers-on that infested the place.  He wondered at his own folly in having endured them for so long.  And it would do Christian good to get away.  She had been looking rather pulled down—­she missed the hunting, of course.  London would do her good—­would be a change.

This, approximately, was what Dick said.  What Lady Isabel said, being an attenuated echo of Dick’s observations, is negligible.  What Christian said was known only to Rinka, the eldest of the fox terriers, who had a habit of sitting in the chair at which Christian, knelt to say her prayers, and would then, with her bland and balmy smile, extort confidences denied to any other living creature.

On Christian fell the brunt of the arrangements, the decisions, worst of all, the dismissals.  The house (pending the materialisation of the Rich Englishman) was to be shut up, so also were all external departments, with their workers, most of whom Christian had known from her childhood; it was her hand that had to cut the knot of these old friendships.  Her father and mother had preceded her, and she was left, alone in the big, old house, with old Evans, and his down-trodden old wife, to be her ministers, with Rinka to be her companion, and with the obliteration of her past life to be her task.

An immense fire of logs and turf blazed in the hall fireplace, a funeral pyre, on which Christian cast one basketful after another of letters, papers, ball-cards, hunt cards, pamphlets, old school-room books, stray numbers of magazines, all the accumulated rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with.  She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of her sight for a single instant.