OF A MESSENGER FROM CHAPELIZOD VAULT WHO WAITED IN THE TYLED HOUSE FOR MR.

MERVYN.
Mervyn was just about this time walking up the steep Ballyfermot Road.
It was then a lonely track, with great bushes and hedgerows overhanging it; and as other emotions subsided, something of the chill and excitement of solitude stole over him.

The moon was wading through flecked masses of cloud.

The breath of night rustled lightly through the bushes, and seemed to follow her steps with a strange sort of sigh and a titter.

He stopped and looked back under the branches of an old thorn, and traced against the dark horizon the still darker outline of the ivied church tower of Chapelizod, and thought of the dead that lay there, and of all that those sealed lips might tell, and old tales of strange meetings on moors and desolate places with departed spirits, flitted across his brain; and the melancholy rush of the night air swept close about his ears, and he turned and walked more briskly toward his own gloomy quarters, passing the churchyard of Ballyfermot on his right.
There were plenty of head-stones among the docks and nettles: some short and some tall, some straight and some slanting back, and some with a shoulder up, and a lonely old ash-tree still and dewy in the midst, glimmering cold among the moveless shadows; and then at last he sighted the heavy masses of old elm, and the pale, peeping front of the 'Tyled House,' through the close and dismal avenue of elm, he reached the front of the mansion.