There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the window-sill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged, somewhere about forty, as she conjectured.

It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House.

She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.
Search was made in the orchard, but no indications of any person's having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flower-pots, which it seemed must have prevented any one's coming within reach of it.
The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen.

The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking firearms with him, opened the back-door, but discovered nothing.
As he shut it, however, he said, 'a thump came on it,' and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened _him_; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window panes, he made no further explorations.
About six o'clock on the Saturday evening following, the cook, 'an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years,' being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed, the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand, laid with its palm against the glass, near the side of the window, and this time moving slowly up and down, pressed all the while against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface.

She cried out, and said something like a prayer on seeing it.