"Hear um?" he snorted enviously. "Singin'! singin'!--forever
singin'!--eyah! sich nonsince, tu."

But, to George, who possessed a musical ear, the ringing tenor sounded
rather airily and sweetly--

"_Hark! hark! the lark at Heaven's Gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs--_"

"Fwhat yez know 'bout that?" Slavin forked viciously at the bacon he was
frying. "Blarney my sowl! an' him not up for 'Shtables' at all! . . ."

"_With ev'rything that pretty is:--
My lady sweet, arise! arise!
My lady sweet, arise!_"

"My lady shweet!"--Slavin snorted unutterable things.

Yawning, the object of his remarks sauntered into the kitchen just then,
and, deeming the occasion now to be a fitting one, the sergeant
introduced his two subordinates to each other.

Yorke, with a bleak nod and handshake, swept the junior constable with a
swiftly appraising glance. As frigidly was his salutation returned.
Redmond remarked the regular features, suggestive rather of the ancient
Norman type, the thin, curved, defiant nostrils and dark, arching
eyebrows. The face, with its indefinable stamp of birth and breeding was
handsome enough in its patrician mould, but marred somewhat by the lines
of cynicism, or dissipation, round the sombre, reckless eyes and