“I’m thinking it might be more comfortable if it isn’t be way av being romantic,” said Judy, sitting down to her knitting in a corner whence she could give the soup pot an occasional magic stir. “They did be piling the logs in Castle McDermott minny the time and we’d have our faces frying and the backs av us frazing. Oh, oh, give me the modern ways ivery time.”

“It seems funny to think of fires in heaven,” ruminated Pat, curling up Turk-fashion on the old hooked rug before the stove, with its pattern of three rather threadbare black cats. “But I want a fire there once in a while…and a nice howly, windy night like this to point the contrast. And now for your ghost story, Judy.”

“I’m clane run out av ghosts,” complained Judy…who had been saying the same thing for years. But she always produced or invented a new one, telling it with such verisimilitude of detail that even Pat and Cuddles were…sometimes…convinced. You could no longer believe in fairies of course, but the world hadn’t quite given up all faith in ghosts. “Howsiver, whin I come to think av it, I may niver have told ye av the night me own great-uncle saw the Ould Ould McDermott…the grandfather of the Ould McDermott av me own time…a-sitting on his own grave and talking away to himsilf, angry-like. Did I now?”

“No…no…go on,” said Cuddles eagerly.

But the ghost story of the Ould Ould McDermott was fated never to be told for at that moment there came a resounding treble knock upon the kitchen door. Before one of the paralyzed trio could stir the door was opened and Tillytuck walked into the room…and, though nobody just then realized it, into the life and heart of Silver Bush. They knew he was Tillytuck because he could be nobody else in the world.

Tillytuck came in and shut the door behind him but not before a lank, smooth-haired black dog had slipped in beside him. McGinty sat up and looked at him and the strange dog sat down and looked at McGinty. But the Silver Bush trio had no eyes just then for anybody but Tillytuck. They stared at him as if hypnotized.

Tillytuck was short and almost as broad as he was long. His red face was almost square, made squarer, if possible, by a pair of old-fashioned mutton-chop whiskers of a faded ginger hue. His mouth was nothing but a wide slit and his nose the merest round button of a nose. His hair could not be seen for it was concealed under a mangy old fur cap. His body was encased in a faded overcoat and a rather gorgeous tartan scarf was wrapped around his neck. In one hand he carried a huge, bulging old Gladstone bag and in the other what was evidently a fiddle done up in a flannel case.