E. Œ. SOMERVILLE and MARTIN ROSS (continued 3)

"About what?' said Dick, who was being bored.

"About your Honour!" returned Mrs. Twomey, in a sort of roar.

"And what the devil are they saying about me?"

"God forbid that I'd put down any dirty stain before your Honour," sobbed Mrs. Twomey, recurring to her earlier metaphor; "it's that big horse that ye're afther buyin' from Docthor Mangan; they say that he gave him to ye too cheap on the head of it——"

"On the head of what, woman?" shouted Dick, now passing, by the well-worn channel of anxiety, from boredom to anger.

"On the head of the Dispinsary! Sure they says 'twas your Honour gave it to Danny Aherne!"

It is unnecessary to record Major Talbot-Lowry's indignation on hearing this charge. The dairy, with its low ceiling and paven floor, echoed, submissively, his well-justified strictures on the lies and evil speaking of his humbler neighbours, and Mrs. Twomey dried her eyes (much as she would scrub out one of her milk-pans) and hearkened.

Who shall say if she believed him? There is a standard of honour, rigid and stern, for gentlemen, just as there is quite another standard for those who do not, in the opinion of a people, Austrian in their definition of what is or is not gentle birth, merit that title. Dick Talbot-Lowry was a gentleman, and, in her own words, no "dirty stain" would ever be attributed to him by Mary Twomey, but even she knew that the ethics of buying and selling a horse apply to no other transaction, and she knew also that in the disposal of a "place," more may occur than meets the eye. She resented the slur on her chieftain, but, in spite of her wrath, she could not feel quite certain that the accusation was entirely unfounded.

CHAPTER XV

The town of Cluhir had more features than those that have already been enumerated, to entitle it to respect. There was, primarily, the great river, that moved majestically in its midst, bearing a church, impartially, on its either bank, and hiding and nourishing in its depths the salmon that gave the town its reason for existence. There was the tall and noble bridge that spanned the river, and joined the rival churches together (a feat of which it is safe to say no other power in Ireland was capable). It was made of that blue-grey limestone that builds bridges, and churches, and houses, with an equal success, and it was the equivalent of a profession for many of the inhabitants of the town, who were accustomed to spend long, meditative hours upon it, criticising the fishermen on the bank below, watching the fish, talking of fish, thinking of fish, without haste, and with a good deal of rest. There was also Hallinan's Hotel, that was very far from being a mere country hotel. The stately bow-windows of its coffee-room have already been mentioned, but its wide verandah must not be forgotten, stone-paven, glass-roofed, umbrageous with tropic vegetation, beneath whose shade, on the sunny days that are enjoyed by the lesser world of men, sad anglers, in ancient tweed suits, lolled, broken-heartedly, in basket-chairs. And, finally, on the town's highest level, was The Mall, reserved, dignified, with a double row of great beech-trees, and behind them, on both sides of the wide roadway, the reserved and dignified houses of the magnates of Cluhir. Eminent in both these qualities was No. 6; almost too much so, Mrs. Mangan thought sometimes. On a wet day she would say, it would be as good for you to be in the Back of Beyond itself, as here, where you might be flattening your nose all day and not see as much as a bike going by.

Dr. Mangan, however, fully recognised the value of this seclusion. His surgery was at the back of the house, and its unbroken quiet was grateful to a man who had much to do, and plenty to think of. He was seated in it, one mild February evening, some months after the election of Dr. Aherne. It had been market-day in Cluhir; patients had been many, and fees satisfactory. The Doctor reclined in front of a good turf and wood fire, and smoked a mellow pipe, and reviewed the run of events. Danny Aherne had been in, to speak to him about a case, that afternoon, and Dr. Mangan's thoughts ran back to that little affair of the Knock Ceoil Dispensary, and of Major Talbot-Lowry's part in the matter. Danny had just nipped in before the Local Government Bill took the power away from the old Dispensary Committees. Dam' luck for Danny. The Major had been useful enough. It hadn't been his vote, so much as his influence, that had got the boy the job. The affair, as far as the Doctor was concerned, was of quite minor importance, but it had been useful in promoting the feeling of intimacy between the houses of Mangan and Talbot-Lowry. That omniscient composite authority, "The people on the roads," whose views had been quoted by Mrs. Twomey, had not been wrong in hinting that the Doctor had permitted the Major to have the best of the bargain about the big brown horse. Old Tom Aherne had made it well worth his while to do so, so everyone had come comfortably out of the transaction. Nor had Dr. Mangan, in diagnosing Major Talbot-Lowry, been wrong in his assumption that Dick, generous, and elated by his success in bargaining, would wish to indemnify his opponent for having had the worst of it, and would consider the support of Danny Aherne as a suitable expression of the wish.

The Big Doctor's intimacy with Dick had progressed of late with remarkable rapidity. During one of those friendly talks over the Mount Music library fire, that had latterly been recurring with increasing frequency, an opportunity had risen for the Doctor—"a warm man," as has been said—to offer to the Major a tangible proof of his friendship.

"After all, there's the money lying idle at my bank," the Doctor had said, breezily.

Dick, in a moment of irritation and perplexity, had expatiated on the expenses consequent on launching sons into professions, and also on the pig-headed determination of annuitants to "hang on," regardless of the inconveniences occasioned to a heavily burdened property by this want of consideration.

"Three half-sisters of my father's," says Dick, "as old as three men each of 'em, and not a notion of dying among 'em! They'll see me out, I'll swear!"

It was then that that idle money had been tactfully referred to.

"I'll knock better interest out of you, Major, than the bank'll give me!" said the Big Doctor, jovially. "I want no security from you! Your word——"

"Oh, that will never do, my dear fellow," Dick had replied, as he was meant to reply. "Of course it must be a pukka business deal. I'll give you——"

In his relief, Dick was ready to give to this kind William of Deloraine any security that he would suggest. It was, of course, a purely nominal affair—but still—what about a mortgage on the house and demesne? How would that do?

The Doctor thought it would do very well.

It should be established, while it was still possible to induce the reader to accept such a statement, that the Big Doctor was, as he himself might have said, "not too bad a fellow altogether!" In public life, a fighter, wily and skilled; compassionate to the poor, yet exacting, implacably, practical recognition of his compassion. In his own house, easy-going and autocratic; in his Church, a slave; a confidential slave, whose gladiatorial gifts were valued, and whose idiosyncrasies might be humoured, but none the less, a slave. He was like an elephant in his hugeness, and suppleness, his dangerousness, and his gentleness. His head was not crowned with the bald benevolence that an elephant wears, but seated on his neck was a mahout, and the mahout was Father Greer, the Parish Priest of Cluhir.

Now, on this quiet evening, he sat and smoked by the fire, and, touching "the tender stops of various quills," his eager thought paused longest on the note that stood for Tishy. Tishy was, in her own way, as sound an asset as any that he possessed, a thoroughly well-made article, a right-down handsome girl, the Big Doctor thought complacently, good enough for any position, and for any man.

"But she's not for any man, I can tell them!" thought Tishy's father; "that's just where the difference of it is! I'll see to that, you may take your oath!"

Then he began to consider his son. He could not feel the same confidence in Barty that Tishy inspired. Where Barty got hold of all his dam-silly notions was more than anyone, least of all his father, could imagine. Nevertheless, they had had their uses, and might still justify themselves "in a sense," he thought; "if not in one way, maybe in another." He moved on to his wife. How could she contribute to the Great Ideas? Ideas were not much in her line, but if you told her what to do, she'd do it. After all, that was the main thing. Women's own notions were often more bother than they were worth. Poor Annie! His big mouth, under the coarse black moustache, spread into a smile, and his blue-grey eyes smiled with it. "I was a fool once about her, and b' Jove, I think I'm not much better now!" he said to himself, indulgently. The handsomest woman this minute in the barony, and she had never so much as looked crooked at any man since the day he married her. After all, she had been a credit at that Mount Music show. There wasn't a woman to touch her in the place; she had held her own with them; she had spent his money as he had told her to spend it. Like a lady. "I like that; how much? Here's your money!" That was what he had told her to say, and she had said it all right. No damned huxterings. And those women whom he wished her to get on with, she had got on with. They liked her. It was easy to see that; and Lady Isabel had often come in to see her since the show, and had stayed for tea, as friendly as you please. Annie was all right.

The gossip of Cluhir had been as mistaken in the matter of the Mangans as gossip often is. Francis Mangan had married his wife for the entirely unjudicious reason that her beauty had mastered his common sense. After his marriage his common sense, having regained the upper hand, was satisfied that, even though her

she would still be the only wife in the world for him. None the less he did not pretend indifference to the knowledge that his wife was the handsomest woman in Cluhir, and there was, indeed, no reason why he should do so. And thus the Big Doctor had a double triumph.

There came a fumbling tap on the door, it opened a little, and Hannah's head came twisting round it.

"Docthor!" spoke the head, like a Teraph, "the Misthress says to have ye come in. The supper's ready, and the priest is in it."

This remarkable statement was accepted by the Doctor with composure, as expressing the fact that Father Greer had arrived.

"Tell her I'm coming this minute," he said, rising ponderously to his feet; "say to them to go down without me."

He locked up the fees that were lying on the table, being a careful man, and washed his huge, pale hands with the particularity that a doctor brings to that task. Huge though they were, they had the sensitiveness that is the gift of music, and is also part of the endowment of the surgeon.

"Ah, here he is now!" said Mrs. Mangan, as the Doctor came, enormously, into the small dining-room. "For shame for you, Francis, to be so late."

"Ah, don't scold him, Mrs. Mangan!" said the priest simpering conventionally. "Wasn't it ministering to the afflicted that delayed him! Doctors mustn't be subjected to the rules that bind ordinary people!"

"That's right, Father," said the Doctor, beginning to carve a large, cold goose, with the skill that his trade bestows; "stand up for me now! Don't let her bully me—though indeed I might be used to it by this time!"

"Doesn't he look like it, the poor fella!" scoffed Mrs. Mangan, directing a melting look at her husband; "starved and pairsecuted! That's what he is!"

Father Greer smiled permissively over the rim of his glass of whisky and water; it was strong and good, and the food was good also, and abundant. Mrs. Mangan's suppers were as generous as her own contours, and were noted for their excellence. She herself was not so much to the priest's taste. He was celibate by nature as well as by profession. Women were antagonistic to him, and Mrs. Mangan, godly matron though she was, seemed to him to symbolize a very different ordering of life to that which he approved; but the Big Doctor was an asset of the Church who must be simpered upon, and for whose sake a little social boredom must be unrepiningly endured. He was an older man, by a good many years, than the Doctor, and was nearer sixty than fifty, but his figure was slight and active, and his scant hair was dark and silky, though there was a light dust of grey in it over the ears, which were thin and outstanding, and shared with his nostrils and eyelids the tinge of red that was denied to the rest of his face. He had the wide, brains-carrying forehead of a fox, as well as a fox's narrow jaw, but his eyes were small and black, and as quick as a bird's.

Barty and Tishy, who were not agreed in many things, were agreed in being afraid of him. They sat in perfect silence, while their mother occupied herself with directions to Hannah, who hovered, indeterminately, near the door, and their father discoursed the visitor. Father Greer was something of a traveller, and he was now giving an instructive account of a recent visit to Switzerland, and of the "winter sports" that had occupied the energies of all in the hotel save himself.

"I found the air as bracing and as serviceable to me as you had led me to expect," he said to his host, "but the sports seemed to me to make a toil of pleasure, and the dancing that went on every night—'twas impossible to sleep! Well! Youthful frivolity, I suppose, must be condoned, but I may say I was greatly annoyed at an incident that occurred at a neighbouring hotel. Mostly English, the visitors were, and they held a Protestant service on Sunday in the saller-mongy."

Barty looked secretly at his sister. His expression said: "And why shouldn't they?"

Father Greer ignored the look, and continued his recital: "As was quite right and proper for them to do."

There was a blink of the black eyes, and Barty recognised that he had not been unobserved.

"There was what is called a Reading-party of young min, with a tutor, at the hotel," went on the priest. "Protestants they were—so far as they had any religion—but only wun of them attended that service. It was said he was the wun and only person able to play the piano in the hotel. Some English ladies requested him to play—I believe there was some very unsuitable joking about it—and he consented. He attended that service; he played their English hymns," Father Greer paused, and gathered up the table with a glance before his climax. "That young man, I regret to say, was an Irish Catholic, one whom you all know—young Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger!"

Mrs. Mangan, who had been too much harassed by Hannah's failure to decode her signals, to attend, heard the name only, and said lovingly:

"The dear boy! How nice for him and you to meet so far away from home, Father!"

Barty's satisfaction at his mother's unexpected comment took the form of kicking his sister, heavily. Tishy, who sang in the chapel choir, and was at this time inclined to regard herself as a pillar of the Church, returned the kick with a viciousness that indicated a hostile point of view, and said loftily:

"But to think they'd ask him! The English are very lax. Don't you think so, Father?"

Dr. Mangan laughed apologetically.

"Well, it's a wonder that a party of sheep would let a poor goat into their fold at all!" he said, in a voice that asked for forgiveness for the erring goat. "I suppose the young ladies got him in a corner, and 'twas hard for him to refuse. You'd hardly blame him for that!"

Father Greer looked bleakly down his nose and said nothing.

Barty scowled, considering that his hero stood in no need of apology. Dr. Mangan continued his endeavour to save the situation.

"But there's no understanding of Protestants!" he resumed, good-humouredly; "I met an old fellow on the train th' other day, old William Henderson of Glen Brickeen, and he was telling me of a row he had with his clergyman, the Reverend Wilson. 'Oh,' says he, 'I gave up going to church on the head of it!' 'And isn't that a great sin for you,' says I, 'to give up going to church?' 'Oh,' says he, 'I explain that to God every Saturday. He understands well what Mr. Wilson done to me, and why I wouldn't go to church as long as he was in it.' 'Maybe,' said I, funning him, 'some day he might be before you in Heaven with his story, and what'll you do then?' 'Oh,' said he, I'll make out a place for myself, never fear! There's places of all sorts in it!' says he. 'I suppose it's the many mansions you're thinking of!' said I. 'You think the poor Roman Catholics don't know their Bibles, but I know that much!'"

"Well, Francis," said Mrs. Mangan, admiringly, "I never knew you that you'd be without an answer, no matter what anyone'd say to you! 'Many mansions,' says you! I declare I'd never have thought of that! Father, wouldn't you say he answered him well!"

Father Greer, having made his point, smiled indulgently, and, as he was deeply involved in a mouthful of tough goose, the smile, blended with the act of mastication, made him look more than ever like a fox, a fox in a trap, gnashing at his captors.

"I always knew the Doctor could be trusted to 'give a knave an answer,' as Shakespeare says," he said, when the power of speech was restored to him; "I'm often surprised at the liberty, I might almost say the licence, that is met with in Protestants in connection with their religion. Take the case of young Mr. Coppinger that I was speaking of. That was a melancholy instance of evil communications corrupting good manners. I may say that I regard with anxiety a too great freedom, what I may call an unrestrained intercourse, between members of the two churches—that is, indeed, if I am justified in describing as a church that which I have heard stigmatised as 'a fortuitous concourse of atheistic atoms'!"

Father Greer's nose came down over his upper lip, the corners of his mouth went up, and a succession of sniffs indicated that he was laughing.

"That may be rather severe," he conceded, "but I may say that, for my part, I consider that Catholics have a sufficiency of pleasing society within their own communion, without striving to go beyond it!"

Father Greer paused, looked round the table as if to receive the general assent, and put his sharp nose into the tumbler of brown whisky and water, to whose replenishing the Doctor had not failed to attend.

A rather stricken silence followed. Mrs. Mangan's large and handsome brown eyes turned guiltily to her husband, and moved on from his face to one of the many trophies of the Mount Music Sale, a Protestant chair back, now flaunting itself on a Catholic chair, under the very eyes of the Parish Priest!

Barty glowered at his plate; Tishy, who had not enjoyed herself at the Sale, felt, in consequence, that she was now justified in doing so at the expense of her family, and held up her head, and looked at her father. It was plain to see that the elephant had felt the prick of the Mahout's ankus. The Big Doctor's face was perturbed. Tishy saw him look at the little priest's glass, and knew that he wished it were empty, in order that he might pour into it a propitiatory oblation. He cleared his throat once or twice before he spoke.

"Very true, Father, very true. I used to think the same thing in England. The chaps I used to meet there—no one would know what religion they belong to, no more than if they were heathens. That young lad that you weren't pleased with—young Coppinger—I believe he's as good a Catholic as any of us, but he happens to be thrown mostly among Protestants. I often think it's no more than our duty as Catholics to try and see as much as we can of him. He and Barty here, got to be very great with each other the time he was with us, but it's only an odd time now that we get a sight of him."

"I was talking to him a long while, the last time he was home," said Barty, looking up, with something smouldering in his voice, "he told me he was going to Oxford next October. It's well to be him!" he ended defiantly.

"Now, I wouldn't be too sure of that at all!" said Father Greer, with a smoothness that implied the laying aside of the ankus; "I think, my young friend, that your good father's house is as safe and happy a place for you as you could wish for!" He turned to the Doctor. "I may say that there is a belief among certain classes that no one is properly edjucated without they've been sent to England. I thought my friend Barty, was a better Irishman than it seems he is!"

"I'm as good an Irishman as any man!" said Barty, in a sudden blaze, "and may-be better than some!"

His face had turned white, and his eyes, that were as large and dark as his mother's, met those of Father Greer with the courage of anger.

"What harm is it to want to get a better education than what I have? I don't see why I shouldn't want to go to Oxford, or Switzerland either, for the matter o' that—as well as another!"

Father Greer, as Dr. Mangan remarked subsequently, took Barty's making a fool of himself very well. He put his head on one side, his black eyebrows went up, and he again uttered that succession of sniffs that served him for a laugh.

"It seems that I have made a railing accusation without meaning it, and brought down fire from heaven, like the Prophet Elijah, only to find that I am myself to forrum the burnt offering!" he said, pleasantly. "Well, well, Barty, don't consume me entirely in your just indignation, and I'll promise you to make no insinuendoes in future as to whether you're a good or bad Irishman!"

I am unable to determine if Father Greer deliberately devised this felicitous amalgamation of the two words that were in his mind, or if it was unintentional, and an indication that Barty's brief flare of revolt had flustered him a little. I am inclined to the latter theory. In any case, the word is a useful one.

CHAPTER XVI

Christian was in the kennels, in their innermost depths. She was, in fact, seated on the bench of "the ladies" lodging-house, on the dry and rustling cushion of bracken on which Major Talbot-Lowry bedded his pack.

Yearning to her, sitting all over her, covering her with their ponderous affection, were the hounds. Two large ladies had each a head on each of her shoulders; two more had laid their chins on her knees, and were gazing raptly into her face. The less favoured stood, and squeezed, and pushed, and panted, with glowing eyes and waving sterns, in as close a circle round her as it was possible to form.

"Dearest things!" apostrophised Christian, "I feel like Nero—I wish you had only one lovely head, so that I might kiss you all at once!"

"Rot!" said Larry, who was leaning against the wall, facing her, and saying: "Down, you brute!" at intervals, to hounds, who, having failed to force their way to Christian, were directing their attention to him, to the detriment of his grey flannel trousers. "And look at your dress from their filthy paws!"

"Good Gawd, Mr. Larry Sir! Don't say paws! 'Ounds 'ave feet" responded Christian, whose imitation of Cottingham was no less accurate now than it had been some eight years earlier; "and I don't care a pin for this old skirt anyway——"

"I'm as fond of hounds as anyone," said Larry, reprovingly, "but I must say I should draw the line at their licking my face!"

"They don't!" said Christian, indignantly; "that's the beauty of them, They never lick—except perhaps my darling Nancy, because I nursed her when she had pneumonia."

"If I were you, Cottingham, I wouldn't let Miss Christian into the kennels," said Larry, with severity, "she makes lap-dogs of the hounds!"

Cottingham had joined the party, and was leaning on the half-door of the kennel, watching his hounds with the never-failing interest of a good kennel-huntsman.

"I couldn't be too 'ard on Miss Christeen, sir," replied Cottingham; "her's the best walk I have. That there Nancy was a sickly little thing enough when I sent 'er to Miss Christeen, and look at 'er now! A slapping fine bitch!"

Christian turned a slow and expressionless eye upon her accuser, indicating triumph.

"It's like this with that Nancy," continued Cottingham, with whom the preaching habit, fostered by years of laying down the law on subservient fields, was inveterate. "Her got that fond of Miss Christeen, her follered 'er about, the way the ole lamb followed Mary, as they say. And that artful she got! Wouldn't try a yard! An' she 'ad the 'ole o' the young entry like 'erself. Any sort of a check, and back they all comes an' looks at me, wi' their 'eads a one side, and their sterns agoin' like this," he wagged a stubby fore-finger to and fro in so precisely the right rhythm, that, stubby as it was, no magic wand could evolve more instantly the scene to be presented; "an' that's 'ow it'd be, th' old 'ounds workin' 'ard, and the young uns lookin' like they 'as nothin' to do only admire of me!"

"Quite right, too!" truckled Christian.

"Ah, Miss Christeen, I'm too used to soft soap, I am!"

"Well, you know, Cottingham, it was I cured Nancy when she took to following me about." She turned to Larry. "Luckily, I broke my wrist, and by the time I was able to ride again she had given me up and taken to hunting."

"That's what you says, Miss," said Cottingham; "but I reckon what her wanted was what her got from me—a good 'idin'!"

Having made his point, Cottingham, a true artist, departed at the little toddling run that in kennels indicates devotion to duty, combined with a slippery floor.

"I had forgotten about your breaking your wrist—I remember about my own, right enough!" said Larry. "What rotten luck!"

"Oh, it's dead sound now," said Christian. "Look!" She stood up, and held out both her slender hands to him across the intervening hounds' backs. "I bet you don't know which is which!"

Larry took a hand in each of his, and flexed the wrists. "The left, wasn't it?" he said, without releasing them. "Not that I see any difference, only I remember now that I heard you had smashed the same one that I did."

"It did hurt—horribly! I expect you know. It hurts still a little, sometimes." She looked at him for sympathy. She was nearly eighteen now, and had caught him up in height, so that her brown eyes looked straight into his blue ones.

"Poor little paw!" said Larry patronizingly; he was going to be twenty-one in a week, and felt immeasurably older than Christian. "Oh, by the way, I forgot! I mustn't say paw. Must I call it 'foot'? I'll make it well, anyhow!" he ended, and, in what he felt to be the manner of a kind uncle, he kissed the injured wrist.

"Quite well now, thank you!" said Christian, mockingly, withdrawing her hands. "If I had only thought of it, I could have got Nancy to lick it! It might have done just as well!" Her colour had risen a little. "Let's come out; it's rather stuffy in here."

At a little distance from the kennel precincts were waiting two small, smooth, white dogs, daughters of the adored companions of Christian's childhood, themselves scarcely less adored than were their parents. Seated, as was their practice, in a well-chosen position, that combined seclusion with a commanding view of the detested hounds, they had not ceased (as was also their practice) from loud and desolate barking, an exercise that in the case of Dooley, the younger and more highly-strung of the couple, was accustomed to develop into a sustained contralto wail. As Christian and Larry left the kennel yard, this moment had been reached. Dooley's nose was in the air, her mouth was as round as the neck of a bottle, her white throat looked as long as a swan's throat, and the bark was softening into sobs. Christian flung herself down, and gathered her and her sister, the second Rinka, into her arms.

"Let's sit down here," she said, sending her hat spinning down the grassy slope; "it's too lovely to go in, and I want a cigarette."

"Haven't got one," said Larry. "Sorry. I gave them up in Lent, and now I'm doing as well without 'em."

"Nerve gone already," said Christian. "That's what comes of missing a season!" She laughed up at him.

"Don't know," said Larry, dropping down beside her on the dry, sun-hot grass; "quite likely; but it wasn't that. The fact was"—he hesitated—"I met a very decent Padre at Mürren. We used to talk a lot about—oh, no end of things! When he found I was Irish he was awfully pleased. He congratulated me on belonging to the Old Faith—he's Irish himself, but he's never lived over here. He said it was such a wonderful link with the people and the past—such a romantic religion! And so it is, you know. It hadn't struck me, somehow, till Father Nugent talked of it. I'm sorry for you, Christian! Don't you feel being a Protestant is a bit—well—stodgy—and respectable—no sort of poetry?"

"I like stodge," said Christian, serenely.

Larry paid this frivolity no attention. He had only recently discovered that he possessed a soul, and he was as much pleased with it as he had been with his first watch, and he found much the same enjoyment in producing and examining it, that had been afforded to him by the watch.

"It was Father Nugent's suggestion to give up smoking," he said, unable to eliminate from his voice a touch of pride, "I knocked off whiskies and sodas, too—but that was off my own bat."

"'Smite them by the merit of the Lenten Fast!'" murmured Christian. Unlike Larry, she evaded personalities and especially those that involved a discussion of religion. "Larry do you remember the awful rags we used to have over that hymn! What ages it is since you were at home! Not since I've had my hair up!"

"By Jove, I hardly knew you when I saw you first!" responded Larry, his sails filling on a fresh tack with characteristic speed. "It's not as light as it used to be. I'm not sure that I like it up."

He looked at her critically. Her hair, thick and waving lay darkly on her forehead, and was stacked in masses upon her small head on a system known only to herself.

"That's a pity," said Christian, coolly, "and I hate it, too. But unluckily, whether you and I hate it or not, it's got to stay up now—that's to say, when it will. I am supposed to be 'out.' I'm nearly eighteen, you know. I never thought I'd live to such an age."

"Oh, wait till you're 'of age,' like me!" said Larry, impressively. "Then you'll know the horrors of longevity. I've got to take over the show—the tenants and all the rest of it—from your father, and Aunt Freddy, next week! An awful job it's going to be! Cousin Dick says that these revisions of rent have played the deuce all round. I shall make old Barty Mangan my agent. He's a solicitor now all right. He can run the show. I like old Barty, don't you?"

"I hardly ever see him," said Christian, cautiously. "He has rather nice looks—more like a poet than a solicitor."

"You see, I want to go abroad, and do some music, and paint," said Larry, pressing on with his own subject. "Take painting on seriously, you know——"

"I know," said Christian, thoughtfully, "I don't envy Barty Mangan! I know Papa's having botheration with our people——"

"All the more reason for me to earn my living by painting!" responded Larry cheerfully.

They were sitting at the edge of a patch of plantation. It was the middle of May, and the young larches behind them were clad in a cloud of pale emerald; the clumps of hawthorn, that were dotted about the park, between the kennels and the river, were sending forth the fragrance of their whiteness; the new green had come into the grass, though it was almost smothered in the snow of daisies; primroses and wild hyacinths had strayed from the little wood, and straggling down the hillside, had joined hands and agreed, the first, to linger, the latter, to hasten into blow, and so to share the month between them. Just below, on the turn of the hill, was a big thicket of furze bushes, more golden than gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. From Larry's woods across the Ownashee, the cuckoo's voice came, as melodiously monotonous and as full of associations as the bell of a village church. Silvery clouds were sailing very high in a sky of thinnest, sweetest blue; little jets of sparkling sound, rising and falling in it, bespoke the invisible, rapturous larks, tireless as a playing fountain; and the sun blazed down on the boy and the girl and the two little dogs seated there in the full of it.

Larry rolled over and over on the grass like a young colt.

"Oh, murder-in-Irish!" he groaned, in sheer ecstasy, "isn't it gorgeous! I always forget how entirely stunning Ireland is, till I come back to it!"

He could say no more, as both dogs had sprung from Christian's arms, and were feverishly licking his face.

"Your own fault!" said Christian, answering his expostulations. "Kind little things, they thought you asked for it."

"I repeat," said Larry, lying on his back, and holding off his assailants with difficulty, "eliminating badly brought-up dogs, that Ireland is the finest country in the world, and—listen to this, Christian!—the Irish are the finest people, and the worst governed!"

"'The foinest pisanthry in Europe'!" said Christian, in gibing exaggeration. "Larry, you've got awfully English!" Larry rolled over and came into play again, sitting bolt upright; "I'm a Home Ruler!"

"Don't be absurd," said Christian, tranquilly.

"I'm not the least absurd," returned Larry. "I mean it. If not a Republican!" he added, ostentatiously, and began to chant:

"I say, you remember the old companions of Finn? Well they're rolling up again! I've started them at Oxford. Six members already! Two men in my college, and——"

"English, of course!" interrupted Christian, with an effective tone of elderly superiority. "People like yourself, who know nothing about it!"

This was an insult not easily to be tolerated; the gage of battle did not lie long at Larry's feet, and it may be admitted that the challenger would have been ill pleased had it been ignored.

In the five years that had passed since the curtain of this narrative went down on Christian, she had changed more than had Larry. It was as though that extra-worldly endowment of her childhood having ceased to manifest in external ways, had turned its light inwards. The power of hearing what others could not hear, had faded, but a subtlety of mind, a clarity, a sort of pondering, intellectual self-consciousness (that had no kinship with that other form of self-consciousness that is only inverted self-conceit) had taken the place of those voices that she had once refused to deny to the inquisitorial John.

The battle, with regard to the resurrected Companions of Finn, having waxed and waned in a course that need not here be followed, the argument took on another phase.

"You know, Larry," Christian said, half-absently twisting and arranging Dooley's little tan ears, in order to express, on Dooley's behalf, with them, various emotions, "it seems to me that all these political revolutions that you are so anxious to start, for the good of Ireland, are like putting the cart before the horse."

"What do you mean?" asked Larry, eyeing her with undisguised surprise.

"Well," said Christian, slowly, gazing across the valley with eyes more than ever like the clearest brown stream, "you've got to begin with the individual. After all, Ireland is made up of individuals, and each of them contributes in some way to the big result. It seems to me that the real Spirit of the Nation is—is——"

Her gaze at the far woods became fixed, and her hands ceased to play with the soft, tan ears.

"Is what?" said Larry, rather impatiently. He was bewildered by this grave, young debater, and was trying to reconcile her with the child he had left behind him last year, or even with the child who, five minutes ago, had wished to impress a comprehensive kiss on all the hounds at once. Moreover, a young gentleman on the imminent verge of official manhood, is justified in resenting ideas, in opposition to his own, being offered to him by a little girl, with her hair only just "up," whom he regards as no more than a niece, or thereabouts.

"Well," said Christian, still more slowly, her eyes lifting from the woods and resting on a shining snowball of a cloud, "it's Religious Intolerance, I think! That seems to me the Spirit of the Nation—my side as bad as yours, and yours as bad as mine——"

"Oh, the parsons and the priests," said Larry, airily. "Oh you wait, Christian! You don't know! You've been stuck down here in a hole. If you met Father Nugent——"

"But I don't mean them only," said Christian, standing to her guns; "I mean the individual—you and me! Just anybody—we're all the same. The Shan van Voght has got to free us from each other before she takes on England!" She looked at Larry; the seriousness left her face, and she shook back the dark hair from her forehead with just the same gay, mutinous toss of the head that a young horse will give when the rider picks up the reins. "I may have been stuck down here in a hole!" said Christian, mocking him; "but anyhow, I haven't lived in England and lost my eye!"

"What about seeing from a distance, and seeing the whole and not the part?" retorted Larry. "What about a bird's eye view?" He had risen to his feet and was looking down at her, feeling the moral support of physical elevation.

"That depends on the bird!" said Christian. "Now, if it were a goose, for example! Like——Hi! Dogs! Look, Larry! Look! Down by the furze bushes! A huge rabbit!"

The discussion closed abruptly, as such discussions will, when the disputants are at the golden age, and views and opinions are winged, and have not yet become ballast, or, which is worse, turned to mooring-stones.

CHAPTER XVII

The origin of the Coppinger's Court picnic was complicated and has remained obscure. Whether its author had been Mrs. Mangan, or her friend, Mrs. Whelply, or young Mr. Coppinger himself, was uncertain, but the fact remained that a picnic, with indirect reference to the blossoming of the bluebells (i.e., the wild hyacinths) was decided upon, and that Larry, in the course of the visit that he never failed to pay to the Mangan household, had placed the demesne of Coppinger's Court at the disposal of the ladies of Cluhir, as a scene for the entertainment.

Larry's fidelity to the Mangans was a matter that was undoubtedly something of a trial to his Aunt Freddy. She was too inflexibly conscientious to attempt to deny, even to Lady Isabel, still less to herself, that such fidelity was creditable, but she felt justified in considering it superfluous; when, as now, it took the form of inviting a party of unknown size, under the patronage of Mrs. Mangan, to accept the Ownashee as its washpot, and (as it were) to cast forth its shoe over Coppinger's Court, Aunt Freddy may be forgiven the manoeuvre that arranged a séance with her Dublin dentist for the date decided upon for the picnic, and may be felt to deserve the sympathy of those who can appreciate the inwardness of her position. And this last, improbable though it may seem to some people, was made immensely more difficult by the simple and irrelevant fact that she, on Sundays, betook herself to the Knock Ceoil Protestant church, while Larry went to the white chapel on the hill. It was to the grey, stone Protestant church that Larry's forbears had gone for one hundred and fifty years or more, even since the then reigning Coppinger had fallen in love with an English heiress, and, agreeing with Henri Quatre, that Paris was well worth a Mass, had 'verted to marry her. Never in living memory had the congregations that filled full the white chapel on the hill, included in their dutiful ranks any being of higher degree than might have been found in those other congregations, that, some nineteen hundred years earlier, were gathered in the hills of Galilee; those humble crowds who came to hear Christ preach, of whom it was said that they were of the common people, and that they heard Him gladly. Miss Frederica was as good a Christian—in some ways probably a better one—as might have been found in the white chapel, but it was impossible for her not to feel, what was, indeed, felt, with a singular mixture of satisfaction and disapproval, by the majority of the white chapel's congregation, that Larry's parents had, socially, been ill-advised when they "made a Roman of him." In the creed of Mary Twomey, and her fellows, it was only in conformity with natural law in the spiritual world that ginthry should go to church, and the like of herself to chapel. She, no more than Frederica, could subdue the feeling of incongruity imparted by the fact of Master Larry and herself worshipping together; it was as though, if she had run into the kitchen to get a sup of hot water, or the wetting of her mouth o' tay, she had found him sitting among the maids in the servants' hall. Mary Twomey, and her fellows, would have indignantly repudiated the idea of taking service with one of their own church. "No! Thank God! I never sank to that!" Mary had once said, when such had been imputed to her. There was no question of religion in it. Merely of fitness. So inveterate in the older Ireland is, or was, what Christian might have considered to be the outcome of The Spirit of the Nation, but that, in this special connection, may with, perhaps, greater accuracy, be ascribed to the aristocratic instinct.

Something like a sheet of thin ice had come into existence between Larry's life and that of his aunt. It had come gradually, almost imperceptibly. There had been a time, after his First Communion, when Larry had confided in Frederica. He had even told her of the anxieties he had felt before his first Confession, and of how difficult he had found it to decide upon the sins that he could, without arrogance lay to his own charge. He told her that he had invented several crimes, in order to dignify the occasion. Frederica wondered secretly how that charming Jesuit Father, to whom, at Monkshurst, she had been introduced as her nephew's spiritual director, had dealt with the sinner; but this, Larry had not divulged. There were, from that time forward, an increasing number of things that Larry did not divulge to his Aunt Freddy, and the sheet of ice slowly became thicker. It was "the religious aspect of the case," as Miss Coppinger complained to Mr. Fetherston, that made it so impossible for her to speak her mind to Larry about the Mangans.

"Do you remember you advised us to send him to Oxford?" she reproached him. "I'm afraid it has only had the effect of making him take his religion more seriously—for which, I suppose, one ought to be thankful——"

"And why not?" the Reverend Charles had replied. "They say all roads lead to Rome, so no doubt the converse holds good, and out of Rome some road must lead to Heaven!"

The Reverend Charles was pleased with his aphorism, but Frederica could not enjoy it. Not even Mr. Fetherston could console her on this matter.

"His very niceness and simplicity make him a prey for undesirables," she mourned, "and he has that peculiar gift of making every one fond of him. I suppose it is his looks——"

"Then you cannot blame the undesirables," her rector responded.

Larry's looks had, certainly, a spell that was something in excess of what may be called their "face-value." Though legal manhood was so soon to be his status, he had still some of the radiance of childhood about him. His hair was of the same pure and infantine gold that it had been when he charged down on the Eldest Statesman on the stepping-stones of the Ownashee; his blue eyes had lost none of their candour; the touch of gilding on his upper lip was effective only at short range, but, when taken in connection with a very white and even set of teeth, and a beaming and ever-ready smile, it carried considerable weight. His fair skin had not yet taken on its summer scorch of carmine, and its soft and babyish pinkness softened the salience of his short nose, and induced the critic to condone the want of decision in his chin.

"Not a handsome boy, exactly," people said, "but," and here people would smile relentingly, "if he had been a girl, one would certainly quite have said 'pretty'—so attractive-looking, and so—so clean!" which might seem to be the condemnation of faint praise, but was, in reality, merely the tribute that Larry's new-minted goldenness of aspect startled from the beholder.

He was no more than five foot nine in height, which was a trial that at times he felt deeply, but there are practical advantages for a young man who rides, in being able to do so at something considerably under eleven stone. At boxing, rowing, and games, what he lost in weight and reach, he made up for in speed and elasticity and endurance. Finally, it may be said that his figure had the gift of making old clothes like new, and new clothes look unaggressive, and when to these attributes is added a faculty for wearing hunting kit with accuracy and finish, it will be understood that Larry had early achieved standing in his college.

The Cluhir picnic, that had so justifiably perturbed Miss Frederica, debouched, like a mighty river, from its wagonettes and outside cars, upon the lawns of Coppinger's Court, at about four of the clock, of a beautiful, balmy May afternoon, and to Larry fell the task of deciding upon its course of procedure. Clad in very white flannels and a prismatic blazer, and looking, as his most tepid supporter would have to allow, a picture of cleanliness, he advanced upon Mrs. Mangan's wagonette, and proffered an arm, fortunately of steel, to facilitate her descent. The five years that had elapsed since Larry was her guest, had effected less change in her than in him. Save that the bisonian fringe now held a grey hair or two in its dark depths, and the curves, that had suggested a Chesterfield sofa to her young friend, were now something more opulent than they had been, Mrs. Mangan's progress along the corridor of eternity had made no perceptible mark on her. Still, in assisting her descent from a high wagonette, an arm of steel was not out of place.

Larry was at the age that, believing itself critical to the point of extinction of the rejected, yet accepts with enthusiasm any female creature that can wear a smart hat with assurance, and wag a flattering tongue with address. The Cluhir ladies were proficient in these arts. Mr. Coppinger was congratulated on his weather; arranged by his skill, poured forth of his benevolence! On his demesne, so green with young leaves, so gay with spring flowers! Kind Mr. Coppinger to have created them in such profusion! And what warmth was there in the Coppinger's Court sun! The second rate luminary dedicated to Cluhir was no more than a candle to it! Mr. Coppinger's Ant was enquired for (this, it should, perhaps, be explained, referred to Frederica, and had no entomological application) suitable regrets at her absence from home were expressed, with a delicate implication that with such a host, and in such weather, the loss was the Ant's, and was practically negligible, so far as the ladies of Cluhir were concerned. And who were these, coming up the path from Mr. Coppinger's lovely river? Ah, yes, the youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry, of course, and which brother was it? Oh, the youngest one? Mrs. Cassidy had thought the youngest of Lady Isabel's family was a twins—or were a twins? Which ought she to say?

"Well, this is half of it, anyhow!" says young Mr. Coppinger, facetiously, with which Mrs. Cassidy, like the Miss Flamboroughs, thought she would have died with laughing.

With the arrival of the youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry, and half the twins, a slight change fell upon Mr. Coppinger's voluble guests. A stiffening faint, almost imperceptible, yet electric, enforced the circle round Larry. Even Mrs. Whelply's confluent simper, that suggested an incessant dripping from the tap of loving kindness, failed a little. A young Mr. Coppinger was a simple affair, but a Miss Talbot-Lowry, however young, might want watching.

The youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry was, happily for herself, quite unaware of the estimation in which she was held. She had, like Larry, that quality of selflessness that is so rare and so infinitely engaging; what was she (she would have thought) that respect should be paid to her? It was a tenet of her eccentric creed that age was not only honourable but was also pathetic, so, when the picnic at large had begun its leisurely advance through the woods to the promised land, Christian selected the oldest and least promising of the Cluhir matrons for her special attention, and made herself so agreeable to her, that Barty Mangan, "mooching" (as his mother afterwards reproached him) solitary, in the rear of the procession, found himself in the remarkable position of wishing that he were his own great-aunt, Mrs. Cantwell.

Barty Mangan's opportunities for meeting Christian had been but few, but they had sufficed to light a fatal star in his sky, and to induce in him, when, as now, he found himself in her vicinity, an attitude towards the rest of the world that justified his mother's employment of the verb to "mooch" (a word that may be taken as implying a moody and furtive aloofness).

There was, Mrs. Mangan was pleased to observe, no mooching about her daughter. On the launching of the picnic, Tishy had immediately assumed the lead, with an aplomb and assurance justified by her family's special intimacy with young Mr. Coppinger, and all who knew Tishy, knew also that she meant to keep it. Dr. Mangan had not over-stated the case when, three years earlier, he had said to himself that she was a right-down handsome girl. Now, at twenty-one and a half, his paternal pride was well justified. Like him, she was tall and strongly built, tall, that is to say, for a class that rarely excels in height, and Tishy's five and a half feet enabled her to look down on most of her friends. Her broad, dark eyebrows grew straight and low over brilliant grey eyes, and were nearly reached by thick upward curled black eyelashes. If her mouth was large, it was well-shaped, and if her nose did not possess the classic severity of her brother's, its challenging tilt was not unattractive. To these charms must be added shining masses of dark hair, and a complexion of so vivid a tone, that it seemed sometimes as though a fog of carmine coloured the very atmosphere about her glowing face. She radiated vitality, the richness and abundance of high summer; she suggested a darkly gorgeous peacock-butterfly, and in the delicate radiance of the spring woods, she seemed out of key with their slender elegance of leaf and spray the soft reticence of their faint greens and greys.

It is indeed hardly fair to expect of Tishy Mangan that she should be worthy of such a setting as southern Irish woods can offer in the month of May. It is the month of the Mother of God, and in the fair demesne of Coppinger's Court, Heaven had truly visited the earth, and was chiefly and specially manifest in the Wood of the Ownashee. The trees stood with their feet bathed in the changeful, passionate blue of the wild hyacinths, a blue that lay sometimes in deep pools, sometimes in thin drifts, like the azure of far skies; the pale ferns rose in it, "like sweet thoughts in a dream"; the grey stems of the beeches were chequered with the sunlight that their thin branches and little leaves tried in vain to baffle and keep at bay. From the unseen river came varying voices; sometimes a soft chuckle that had the laughing heart of the spring in it, sometimes a rich and rushing harmony, that told of distant heights and the wind on the hills. There was a blackbird who was whistling over and over again the opening bar of the theme of a presto, that, only last week, Larry had heard, whipped out with frolic glee by the violins of a London orchestra. He wondered if, with such themes, it is the blackbirds who inspire the musicians, or if both have access to the same secret well of music, in which each can dip his little bucket, and bring listeners in the outer world a taste of the living water of melody. But since (in spite of the Artistic Temperament) he was a normal boy, what he said was:

"Stunning! Isn't it!" while he stood still, waiting, for the hidden artist to favour them with another flourish of that gay string of jewels. "He's 'recapturing' it all right, eh?"

The much-quoted quotation passed by Tishy as the idle wind. Even had she recognised the allusion, she would have considered the professional raptures of a blackbird a rather dull subject of conversation. The gallants of Cluhir did not deal in such matters in tête à tête with her, and she thought, as she had thought at the children's party, long ago, that Larry, if not quite a bore, might, in spite of Coppinger's Court, rather easily become one.

"Oh, he's stunning enough!" she replied, with her full-throated, contralto laugh; "It must be his first cousin we have in the garden behind Number Six! Dad says he doesn't know, does him or me sing the loudest!"

By Jove! She sings! thought Larry (as he was meant to think). Of course! What a fool he was to have forgotten it! And as, at this period of his career, of the three arts, who were always riding a pace in his soul, Music, Painting, and Literature, Music happened to be the leading horse, Larry looked upon Tishy with eyes in which a new ardour had awakened, and proceeded with his accustomed speed to mature the details of the concert upon which he had, during the last sixty seconds, enthusiastically decided.

Old Mrs. Cantwell, although unpromising of aspect, was by no means as deplorable, socially, as Christian had assumed her to be. The fact that she was the untrammelled owner of a soundly-invested fifteen thousand pounds, that she was the aunt whom Dr. Mangan delighted to honour, combined with the allied fact that she had paid for the hiring of the picnic-bearing wagonette, gave her an importance that could be undervalued only by one as ignorant of the greater concerns of life as was Christian. Mrs. Cantwell accepted the companionship of the youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry as no more than her due, and the thought that compassion had prompted its bestowal, was very far from her mind. None the less, the Noah's Ark principles that governed implicitly, if not ostensibly Cluhir entertainments of this nature, were firmly embedded in her being, and she was entirely aware of the furtive presence of Barty, at the rear of the procession of which she and Christian formed the last couple.

"Now, my dear," she observed, while she and Christian paced side by side, along the river path, "you shouldn't be wasting time on an old woman like me! When I was young, we'd have called this a Two and Two party, and I promise you that the likes o' you and me wouldn't have been reckoned a proper couple at all! Not when I was a girl!"

"I should have said that you and I were irreproachably proper, Mrs. Cantwell," responded Christian, gaily; "it isn't very kind of you to say that we aren't behaving as we should!" She laughed into Mrs. Cantwell's old face, and she, being quite unused to girls who took the trouble to flirt with her, began to think that Frankie Mangan (thus she designated her nephew, the doctor) was right when he said that the youngest of the Talbot-Lowrys was the best of the bunch.

"Ho! Ho! Ho!" she said, with a laugh like the whinny of an old horse; "it's a long time since I kicked my heels over anything higher than a hearth-rug! But I can tell you, my dear, I was a good warrant for a play-boy when I was your age! There wasn't a young girl, no, nor a young man either, that I couldn't dance down if I gave my mind to it!"

Christian's response was satisfactory, and Mrs. Cantwell, moved to give a sample of her bygone prowess, executed a hippopotamus-like hop and shuffle among the rustling, orange beech leaves of last year.

"Polkas and Mazoorkas!" she exclaimed. "Them was all the go in my time! Come on here, Barty, ye omadhaun! I believe I could dance you off those long legs of yours this minute, if I was to give me mind to it!"

Barty, thus adjured by his great-aunt, drew near. Mrs. Cantwell was not a person to be lightly disobeyed, but his dark eyes were full of apprehension. What might Aunt Bessie not say! She was incalculable, terrible.

There are old people who appear to find an indemnity for their lost youth in permitting to themselves, in dealing with later generations, a scarifying freedom of humour in connection with subjects which once they held sacred (for there are few souls that have not at some time enshrined a tender emotion).

Barty had suffered before now from Aunt Bessy, and he thought that if she made of him an offence to Miss Talbot-Lowry, he would straightway rush into the river and drown himself. Aunt Bessy, however, potentially Rabelaisian though she might be, was perfectly aware of the fact that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence.

"See here, Barty," she said, "let you go on now, and tell your mother not to be waiting tea for me. I'll take me own time. Tell her never fear I'll turn up, only I like to go me own pace!" She turned to Christian. "Go on you too, my dear; I'm well enough pleased with me own company, and I hate to be delaying you. I'll sit down for a while and admire the scenery."

Thus did Aunt Bessy, as she complacently told herself, watch over the interests of her great-nephew, and though her method was crude, it indisputably achieved its object.

Christian and Barty Mangan walked on in silence that was made companionable by the gurgling whisper of the river behind its screen of hazels and alders; a whisper broken now and again by the tittering laugh of the flying water over a shallow place, like someone with a good story that he cannot quite venture to tell out loud.

Barty was saying to himself, distractedly: "What'll I say to her? What'll I talk to her about?" with each repetition winding himself, like a cocoon, deeper in webs of shyness.

Christian's social perceptions were hypersensitive, and the cris de coeur of her suffering companion were only too audible to her spiritual ear. At eighteen, the quality of mercy has seldom developed; the young demand mercy, they expect to receive, not to bestow it; but in this girl was something that made her different from her fellows. It was as though a soul more tempered, more instructed, more subtle and refined, had been given to her, than is vouchsafed to the majority of the poor creatures who are sent into this difficult world with an equipment that rarely meets its demands.

This is a long-winded way of saying that Christian realised that she had to restore confidence in Larry's young friend, and that she proceeded forthwith to do so. She would have laughed at the thought that anyone could be afraid of her, but she felt instinctively that a soothing monologue, a sort of cradle-song, was what the occasion demanded; so she began to speak of the bluebells, the woods, the weather, saying with a sort of languid simplicity, the things that the moment suggested; "babbling," as she subsequently assured Judith, "of green fields," until she had so lulled and bored him, that in self-defence he produced an observation.

"D'you read, Miss Christian?" said Barty, bringing forth his mouse with an abrupt and mountainous effort.

Christian repressed the reply that she had possessed the accomplishment for some years, and asked for further information.

"Poetry," said Barty, largely; "it's—it's the only reading I care for. I thought you might like it—" he added, hurriedly, and was again wrapped in the cocoon.

"Oh, I do, very much," said Christian, trying hard not to quench the smoking flax; "I've learnt quantities by heart, and Larry is always lending me new books of poetry. He says that you and he discuss it together."

"I never knew one like him!" said Barty, with sudden energy. "There's no subject at all that he's not interested in!" In the heat of his enthusiasm for Larry, the cocoon wrappings were temporarily shrivelled. He turned his dark short-sighted eyes on Christian, and took up his parable with excitement.

"Did he tell you he's learning Irish? I'll engage it'll be no trouble to him!"

"He's always getting hold of new ideas," said Christian; "I wish I could learn Irish."

"There's a branch of the Gaelic League in Cluhir," said Barty, eagerly. "There are a lot learning Irish. I suppose you wouldn't be disposed to become a member, Miss Christian?" He gazed at her imploringly.

"I don't know if I should be allowed," said Christian, hesitatingly. "You see I've only just come home. I've been at school in Paris for the last two years——"

A memory of a ferocious denunciation of the Gaelic League by her father came to her; she wondered what Barty would do if she offered him one of the profane imitations of the Major that had earned for her the laurels of the schoolroom.

"Oh, I'm quite sure I mightn't become a Gaelic Leaguer!" she repeated, beginning to laugh, while samples of her father's rhetoric welled up in her mind.

Barty thought he had never seen anything so enchanting as her face, as she looked at him, laughing, with wavering lights, filtered through young beech leaves, in her eyes. He felt a delirious desire to show her that he was not a tongue-tied fool; that he also, like Larry, was a man of ideas.

"I wish to God!" he said, with the disordered violence of a shy man, "that there was anny league or society in Ireland that would override class prejudice, and oblitherate religious bigotry!"

He had snatched a paragraph from his last address to the Gaelic Leaguers of Cluhir, and with it was betrayed into the pronunciation that mastered him in moments of excitement.

Christian said to herself that she thanked heaven Judith wasn't there to make her laugh.

"I don't think I'm a religious bigot," she said, with a faint tremor in her voice, "but one never knows!" Her head was bent down, the brim of her large hat hid her face.

Barty was stricken. What devil had possessed him? She was hurt! She was a Protestant, and in his cursed folly he had made her think he was reproaching her for Bigotry. Good God! What could he do?

Two emotions, hung, as it were, on hair-triggers, held the stage. In Christian, the fiend of laughter held sway, in poor Barty, the angel of tears. It was perhaps well for them both that their next step in advance took them round a bend in the path, and brought them face to face with the picnic.

CHAPTER XVIII

Young Mr. Coppinger had been well inspired in his selection of a site for the entertainment. The trees along the river's bank had ceased for a space, leaving a level ring of grass, whereon certain limestone boulders had scattered themselves, with the deliberate intention, as it would seem, of providing seats for picnickers. Across that fairy circle of greenness a small vassal-stream bore its tribute waters to the Ownashee, with as much dignity as it had been able to assume in the forty level yards that lay between its suzerain and the steep glen down which it had flung itself. Not only had young Mr. Coppinger been so gracious as to provide this setting for the revel, but he was even now sacrificing a spotless pair of white flannel trousers to the needs of the company, and had concentrated on the cajolery of the fire, which, obedient to the etiquette that rules picnic fires, refused to consume any fuel less stimulating than matches. Other of the young gentlemen of the party, including the half-twin, Mr. George Talbot-Lowry (now a sub-lieut. R.N.) were detailed to gather sticks, a duty that was so arranged as to involve, with each load of firewood, the jumping of the vassal-stream, and thus gave opportunity for a display akin to that of the jungle-cocks, who, naturalists inform us, leap emulatively before their ladies. Prominent among these was that youth who, as a medical student, had inspired Miss Mangan in flapperhood, with an admiration for his gifts, intellectual and physical, that was only equalled by his own appreciation of these advantages. His opinion remained unchanged, but he was beginning to fear that Tishy's taste was deteriorating. None sprang more lightly across that little stream, or commented more humorously on men and things, than Captain Edward Cloherty, R.A.M.C.; yet Miss Mangan, to whom these exercises were dedicated, remained oblivious of them and aloof, apparently wholly absorbed by Martha-like attentions with regard to the public welfare, and particularly those connected with the fire. It was not for nothing that Tishy had had to rise early on many a winter morning to see that her father should go forth to his work suitably warmed and fed. Now, with scathing criticisms of the methods of Mr. Coppinger, she swept him from his position as stoker, and, as by magic, or so it seemed to him, the sticks blazed, the kettle began to sing. Miss Mangan's skill was not limited to the prosaic lighting of material fires only. With the two most distinguished young men of the party at her feet, she rose to the height of all her various powers. The fire roared and crackled, the kettle bubbled, and Tishy's grey and gleaming glances through the smoke were like a succession of boxes of matches, cast upon the responsive fires of Larry's and Georgy's holiday hearts.

The young May moon has often been a factor in affairs of the heart whose importance cannot be ignored. It is true that on this especial afternoon the mischief might seem to have been begun before she could, strictly, have been held responsible; none the less her madness must have been in the air, otherwise it is difficult to account for the joint and simultaneous overthrow of two young gentlemen of taste and quality, by Miss Tishy Mangan.

Georgy, aged but 19, just home from far and forlorn seas, with, as the poet says, a heart for any fate, might have been excused for swallowing any good provided for him by the gods, whole, and without criticism, but for Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, lately come of age, a man of taste, endowed with special finesse of feeling, it might have been expected that a highly-coloured peacock butterfly would have had but scant appeal. In fact, one is driven back upon the young May Moon as the sole plausible explanation of the fact that, on that afternoon of bewitchment, Tishy Mangan went to Larry's head.

These temporary aberrations are afflictions for which the most refined young men must occasionally be prepared, and Larry's overthrow was not without justification. Quite apart from her looks—and anyone would have been forced to admit that they were undeniable—there was her voice, the true contralto timbre, thick and mellow, dark and sweet, like heather honey, he thought, while he and Georgy sprawled on the grass at her feet (and she had good feet) making very indifferent jokes, in that exaggerated travesty of an Irish brogue which is often all that an English school will leave with Irish boys, and vicing with each other in the folly proper to such an occasion.

"I don't see your shoe-buckles!" Larry said, looking from her feet to her lips, with a meaning and impudent lift of his blue eyes. "Have you given up wearing them?"

Tishy's colour deepened; she remembered instantly what she was meant to remember.

"You're regretting the choice you made, are you?" she said, with a toss of her head. "Never fear! The buckles will be there when they're wanted!"

"Don't trouble about them!" says Larry, tremendously pleased with his success as a flirtatious man of the world; "I don't think they will be required!"

It is necessary to have attained to a reasonably advanced age to be able to recognise pathos in the fatuities that so frequently form a feature of love's young dream. Christian, listening with one ear to her brother and cousin, while into the other the genuine idiom of her native land flowed, ardently, from the now unsealed lips of Barty Mangan, began to wonder why the boys were talking like stage Irishmen; Georgy, she knew, was idiot enough for anything, but she had to admit to herself that Larry, also, was rather overdoing it. Christian was able to feel amused, but she also felt, quite illogically, that what had been distaste for Tishy Mangan was rapidly deepening into dislike.

The picnic raged on, with prodigious eatings and drinkings, with capsizings of teapots in full sail, with disastrous slaughterings of insects (disastrous to plates and tablecloths rather than to the insects) with facetious doings with heated tea-spoons and pellets of bread, with, in short, all that Mrs. Mangan and her fellow hostesses expected of a truly prosperous picnic.

Captain Cloherty, alone, of all the company, failed to contribute his share to the sum of success. He sat silent, a thing of gloom, the lively angle of whose waxed, red moustache only accentuated the downward droop of the mouth beneath it. But the skeleton at the feast has its uses, if only as a contrast, and Mrs. Mangan, who was more observant than she appeared to be, noted the gloom with a gratified eye, and being entirely aware of its cause, said to herself with satisfaction:

"Ha, ha, me young man!"

This picnic was, in truth, made ever memorable in the circle of Mrs. Mangan's friends by reason of the triumph of Tishy.

"Ah, that was the day she cot the two birds under the one stone!" Great-Aunt Cantwell (who did not care for her great-niece) was accustomed to say. "Well! Such goings-on! And after all, Tishy's nothing so much out of the way, for all Frankie Mangan thinks the world should die down before her!"

The two birds referred to were still fluttering round their captor, when a new element was added to the party in the large presence of "Frankie Mangan" himself. The Big Doctor approached slowly, elephant-like in his noiseless, rolling gait, impressive, as is an elephant, in size, in the feeling he imparted of restrained strength, of intense intelligence, masked, as in an elephant, with benevolence, and held watchfully in reserve.

He now advanced upon the scene of festivity with purpose in his manner.

"Now, ladies! Let me tell you I'm come on a very unpopular errand! To apply the closure! I think you're all sitting out here long enough for the time of year. Remember it's only May!"

"We're more likely to remember it's Mayn't!" retorted Mrs. Whelply, who was a recognised wit, and opponent of the Big Doctor. "Isn't it enough for him to bully us when we're sick, but he comes tormenting us when we're well, too!"

Thus she appealed to her fellow-matrons, looking round upon them for support with a festive eye.

"You'll none of you be well long, if you don't mind yourselves!" answered, with equal spirit, the Doctor, with a quiet eye on his daughter and her attendant swains.

"Why then I have a sore throat this minute with scolding Mr. Coppinger for the nonsense he's talking!" declared Mrs. Whelply. "Asking me to sing a cawmic at the concert he says he's going to have! There's no fear but whatever I sing will be cawmic enough!"

"I'm sure I'll have great pleasure in cauterising you!" responded the Doctor, gallantly; "but if you'll take my advice now, you won't want so much of it later on!"

"I thought you were going to take me on the river," said Tishy in a low voice to Larry, looking resentfully at her father.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Larry, quickly; "much better than the river—we'll go back to the house and dance! I'll fix it up with your father!"

"Good egg!" said Sub-Lieut. Talbot-Lowry, with seaman-like decision, "Miss Mangan will kindly note all waltzes are reserved for use of naval officers!"

"Miss Mangan will kindly do no such thing!" returned that young lady, dealing a flash from between her curled eyelashes that put the naval officer temporarily out of action, so devastating was its effect.

Had not Frederica Coppinger, resting in her club in Dublin, after a severe afternoon with her dentist, some intuition, some spirit-warning, of what was befalling at the home of her ancestors? I believe that those spear-thrusts of nerve-pain that assailed her just before dinner, must have been the result of the wireless summons of distress sent forth to her by her upper-housemaid.

"What next, I wonder, will Master Larry be asking for?" said the upper housemaid to the cook. "The drawing-room carpet pitched into the study, and Miss Coppinger's own room turned upside down for the riff-raff of Cluhir to be powdering their noses in! 'Haven't she no powder?' says they. 'No matter,' says the Doctor's daughter, 'sure I have a book of it in me little bag!'"

"I wouldn't at all doubt her!" said the cook, saturninely, "But what's the drawn'-room carpet to conjuring a supper out of me pocket in five minutes? I ask you that, Eliza Hosford!"

None the less, with that deep loyalty to the honour of the house that is a feature in Irish domestic life as wonderful as it is touching, the staff of Coppinger's Court were resolved that—as they say in China—the face of Master Larry should not be blackened, and The Riff-Raff of Cluhir were served with a ceremony and a success that left nothing to be desired.

Dr. Mangan sat in a very large armchair in front of a big fire of logs, in the hall, and smoked meditatively, and was seemingly quite unaware of the couples who moved past him between the dances, passing out through the open hall-door into the moon-lit May night. He did not even raise an eyelid when his daughter sailed by him, as she did many times, with the ostentation of the young lady who is aware that her prowess is the subject of comment, in company, alternately, with the two captives of her bow and spear who had offered so feeble a resistance to those weapons. Tishy and her father alike ascribed her victory to that redoubtable and already creditably battle-scarred bow and spear; they neither of them recognised the acknowledgments that were due to a certain powerful ally, the May moon. She had stolen up the sky at the back of the woods. The first Larry knew of her was the vast, incredible, pale disc behind the topmost boughs of the pine trees, so near that it seemed to him as though the crooked black branches alone were holding her back, and that her white fire that was pouring through them must consume them, "and then it will be our turn," he said, seriously, and without preamble, to Tishy.

"Our turn for what?" asked Tishy, very naturally.

"Our turn to be resolved into moonshine. You'll see me fading away into silver smoke in a minute," replied Larry. "Let's get out of this, I'm getting frightened! Hold my hand tight!"

"Go on with your nonsense!" said Tishy. "And will you tell me how can I hold your hand when it's round my waist?"

Which was reasonable enough, and may be taken as a sufficient indication of what the moon was already responsible for.

A point of red light moved in the darkness above the seat under the laurels, to which they were repairing, and the scent of a Virginian cigarette was wafted to them.

"Who's that?" Tishy whispered, pressing nearer to Larry; but she was agreeably certain that it was the gloomy and misanthropic Captain Cloherty, whose place of refuge they had invaded.

Christian, meanwhile, unlike Captain Cloherty, was conscientiously endeavouring to enjoy herself, and was finding that the wheels of the chariot of pleasure drave heavily. That Barty Mangan was a good dancer was an alleviation, but among those stigmatised by Eliza Hosford as the riff-raff of Cluhir, those now forgotten measures of the first years of this century, the prancing barn-dance, the capering pas-de-quatre, lent themselves to a violence that, even at the uncritical age of eighteen, Christian found overpowering. "They danced like the Priests of Baal," she told Judith. "One expected to see them cut themselves with knives!"

The information that the dog-cart had come for her was of the nature of a release. Barty put her into it. The May moon shone on his pale face as he looked up at Christian, and reverently took her hand in farewell. She had begun to find his dark and humble devotion oppressive; she liked him, which did not prevent her from thanking heaven when he released her hand from a pressure that had lasted longer than he knew. He stood on the gravel and watched the departing dog-cart vanish, like a ghostly thing, into the elusive mist of moonlight. The May moon, now sailing full overhead, looked with a broad satisfaction on the hardest hit of her victims.

CHAPTER XIX

At intervals in all histories there comes a pause, in which the moralities proper to the occasion are assembled, expounded and expanded. Such a moment might now seem to have arrived, its theme being the grain-of-mustard-seed-like character of the Cluhir picnic, as compared with the events that subsequently dwelt in its branches, nesting there, and raising up other events that flew far and wide, farther and wider than they can here be followed. But since moralities appeal only to the moral (to whom they are superfluous) it seems advisable to proceed at once to the primary result, which was the concert, that sprang like a Phœnix from the ashes of that fire on which the picnic kettle was boiled.

The scheme had various appeals for its two chief promoters, young Mr. Coppinger and Sub. Lieut. Talbot-Lowry, R.N. Immanent in it was the necessity for frequent, almost for daily, visits to No. 6, The Mall, Cluhir. For the former of these gentlemen, whose acquaintance with the Mangan family was now of long, if of intermittent, familiarity, these visits afforded a less thrilling emotion than they held for the latter, who found himself honoured and welcomed in a degree to which he was quite unaccustomed at home. Larry was not quite sure that he approved of this blaze of social success for his young cousin. It is one thing to receive, languidly, the adulation of those in whom such adulation may be regarded as an indication of a widening horizon; but when an equal veneration is lavished upon the junior and disdained play-fellow of earlier years, the result is often a reconsideration of values. The May madness that rose like a mist from the bluebells in the woods of the Ownashee, and culminated in the magical light of the full moon, began to lift from the spirit of young Mr. Coppinger, leaving him, as he formulated it to himself (and found much satisfaction in the formula) bereft, bored, and benignant. He was quite prepared to retire gracefully in favour of Georgy, and was pleased with the thought that his interest in Tishy had been merely the outcome of a mood—l'après-midi d'un faune—so to speak. There was something artistic in these transient emotions, and his future, as at present determined, was to be devoted to art; certainly not to Tishy Mangan. Yes, he would leave Tishy to Georgy; all but her voice; in that, as an artist, he still retained an interest, the interest of the impresario, whose search for stars is as absorbing as is that of the astronomer in pursuits of new worlds.

The passion and energy of the promoter are, it may be supposed, born in human beings in a certain proportion to those who are to become their victims. In Larry, both qualities were highly developed, and in no way did he prove the genuineness of his heaven-given flair more surely than in his discovery and annexation of Christian, as that rare and precious thing, a sympathetic and capable accompanist.

But although the thought of dwelling upon this and other of the details of the Cluhir concert, is appealing, it must be dismissed. So much has already been said in the hope that some further indications as to the character and conduct of some of our young friends may have been deduced; but now, certain glossings upon the household of Mount Music must be inflicted, since it is with it, rather than with the capabilities of young Mr. Coppinger's troupe, that we are mainly occupied.

It is not easy to say whether the process of emergence from the sheath of childhood, a condition that has characteristics more or less common to us all, is more interesting to feel than to observe. In Christian's case, the interest was felt exclusively by herself, her family being healthily absorbed in the conjugation of the three primary verbs, to be, to do, and to have, in relation, exclusively, to themselves, and that merely from the skin outwards. Soul-processes and developments were unknown to them in life, and were negligible in books. Lady Isabel pursued her blameless way, doing nothing in particular, diligently and unpunctually, and spending much time in writing long and loving letters to those of her family who were no longer beneath her wing, in that particular type of large loose handwriting whose indefinite spikes stab to the heart any hope of literary interest. Who shall say that she did not do her duty according to her lights? But she was certainly quite unconscious of such matters as soul-processes.

Alone of the Mount Music children, Christian was aware of an inner personality to be considered, some spirit that heard and responded to those voices and intimations that, as a little child, she had accepted as a commonplace of every day. By the time that she was sixteen the voices had been discouraged, if not stilled, their intimations dulled; but she had discovered her soul, and had discovered also, that it had been born on the farther side of the river of life from the souls of her brethren, and that although, for the first stages, the stream was narrow, and the way on one bank very like that on the other, the two paths were divided by deep water, and the river widened with the passing years.

Richard, pursuing the usual course of Irish eldest sons, had adopted the profession least adapted for young men of small means, and large spending capacity, and had gone into his father's old regiment. John, the zealot of an earlier day, was at Oxford, considering the Church; Georgy's career has been announced, and the remaining twin had, with the special predisposition of his family towards financial failure, selected the profession of land-agent, in a country in which peasant-proprietorship was already in the air, and would soon become an accomplished fact.

There remains, to complete the family history, Judith, and she, now aged twenty-one, was possibly the sole member of the house of Talbot-Lowry for whom a successful future might confidently be anticipated. Judith, a buccaneer by nature and by practice, was habitually engaged in swash-bucklering it on a round of visits. She was good-looking, tall, talkative, and an able player of all the games proper to the state of life to which she had been called. She was a competent guest, giving as much entertainment as she received, being of those who contribute as efficiently indirectly, as directly, to conversation, and are normally involved in one of those skirmishes of the heart, that cannot be described as engagements, but that, none the less, invest their heroines with an atmosphere of respect, and provide hostesses with subjects of anxiety and interest. At an early age, Christian was promoted by her elder sister to the position of confidante, and justified the promotion by the happy mixture of sympathy and cynicism with which she received the confidences. She was now well versed in the brief passions that, beginning at the second or third dance of a regimental ball, would, like some night-flowering tropic blossom, arrive at full splendour by supper time, and would expire languorously, to the strains of "God save the King." Christian, though young, was, as had been said, a capable audience. She could listen, with the severe and youthful grace that seemed to set her a little apart from others of her standing, to the feats of Judith and her fellow-blackguards, savouring and appraising the absurdities, and her comments upon them were offered with a sympathetic and skilled comprehension that excused her in Judith's eyes for her lack of ambition to emulate them.

Dick Talbot-Lowry had ceased to boast of the predominance of the masculine gender among his offsprings, and rarely alluded to his sons without coupling with their names a vigorous statement of how far in excess of their value was their cost, usually ending with an enquiry into the dark rulings of Providence, who had bestowed an expensive family with one hand, and with the other had taken away the means of supporting it. Dick was sixty-four now, an unhappy moment in a dashing and artless career, with the shadow of advancing old age blighting and reproving the still ardent enjoyment of the pleasures of youth.

"I'm an old man now!" Dick would say, without either feeling or meaning it, and would bitterly resent the failure of his sons to contradict a statement with which they were in complete agreement. Only Christian, "of all his halls had nursed," tried to maintain her father in a good conceit of himself, and to "rise his heart"; but there are few hearts for which it is more difficult to perform that office than the heart of a man, who, having ever (as King David says) taken pleasure in the strength of horses, and delighted in his own legs, is beginning to find that the former have become too strong, and the latter too weak for either comfort or confidence.

And not these things only were troubling Dick. The common lot of Irish landlords, and Pterodactyli, was upon him, and he was in process of becoming extinct. It was his fate to see his income gradually diminishing, being eaten away, as the sea eats away a bulwark-less shore, by successive Acts of Parliament, and the machinery they created, "for the purpose," as old Lord Ardmore was fond of fulminating, of "pillaging loyal Peter in order to pamper rebel Paul!" The opinion of very old, and intolerant, and indignant peers cannot always be taken seriously, but it is surely permissible to feel a regret for kindly, improvident Dick Talbot-Lowry, his youth and his income departing together, and the civic powers that he had once exercised, reft from him. Such power as he had had, he had exercised honourably and with reverent confidence in precedent, and when he had damned Parnell, and had asserted, in stentorian tones, that Cromwell was the only man who had ever known how to govern Ireland, and he, unfortunately, was now in hell; where, the Major would add, he was probably better off, his contribution to constructive politics had ended. He and his generation, reactionary almost to a man, instead of attempting to ride the waves of the rising tide, subscribed their guineas to construct breakwaters that were pathetic in their futility. Gallant in resistance, barren in expedient, history may condemn the folly of the. Old Guard of the "English Garrison," but it cannot deny, even though it may deride, its fidelity.

CHAPTER XX

Lady Isabel Talbot-Lowry had invited what is concisely spoken of as "people" to tea and tennis. The month was June, but the weather was March, or at best, a sullen and overcast April. The purport of the entertainment had been the exhibition, to rival amateurs, of the Mount Music herbaceous borders, which, though "not looking quite their best," were as nearly approximating to that never-achieved ideal, as is ever the case with either gardens or children; but showers of chill rain had marred the display, and the lawn tennis was fitful, and subject to frequent interruption. In these circumstances, a fire of turf and logs did not need apologies for its presence, and Lady Isabel and her companion Heads of Households sat with it as their focal point, and thought, as they saw the players flitting to and fro between the showers, and the house, and the lawn tennis grounds, that middle age had privileges that were not to be despised.

The long and lofty drawing-room of Mount Music was a pleasant place enough, even on this showery day. Some five or six generations of Talbot-Lowrys had lived in it, and left their marks on it, and though the indelible hand of Victoria, in youthful vigour, had had, perhaps, the most perceptible influence on it as a whole, the fancies and fashions of Major Dick's great-grandmother still held their places. An ottoman, large as a merry-go-round at a fair, immovable as an island, occupied, immutably, the space in the centre of the room immediately under a great cut-glass chandelier. Facing it was the fireplace, an affair of complicated design, with "Nelson ropes" and knots, and coils, in worked and twisted brass, and deep hobs, in whose construction the needs of a punch-kettle had not been forgotten. Above it, a high, delicately-inlaid marble mantelpiece, brought from Italy by Dick's great-grandfather, was surmounted by a narrow ledge of marble, just wide enough to support the base of a Georgian mirror of flamboyant design, in whose dulled and bluish depths were reflected the row of old white china birds, that were seated, each on its own rock, on the shelf in front of it. Family portraits in frames whose charm of design and colour made atonement for the indifference of the painting, alternated with brown landscapes in which castles, bridges, and impenetrable groves were dimly to be discovered through veils of varnish; flotillas of miniatures had settled, like groups of flies, wherever on the crowded walls foothold could be found, and water-colours, pencil-drawings, and photographs, rilled any remaining space. There were long and implacable sofas, each with its conventional sofa-table in front of it; Empire consoles, with pieces of china incredibly diverse in style, beauty, and value, jostling each other on the marble slabs; woolwork screens, worked by forgotten aunts and grandmothers, chairs of every known breed, and tables, tables everywhere, and not a corner on one of them on which anything more could be deposited. The claims of literature were acknowledged, but without enthusiasm. A tall, glass-fronted cupboard, inaccessibly placed behind the elongated tail of an early grand piano, was filled with ornate miniature editions of the classics, that would have defied an effort—had such ever been made—to remove them from their shelves, whereon they had apparently been bedded in cement, like mosaic. It was a room that, in its bewildering diversity, might have broken the hearts of housemaids or decorators; untidy, without plan, with rubbish contending successfully with museum-pieces, with the past and present struggling in their eternal rivalry; yet, a human place, a place full of the magnetism that is born of past happiness, a place to which all its successive generations of sons and daughters looked back with that softening of the heart that comes, when in, perhaps, a far-away country, memories of youth return, and with them the thought of home. The ladies who, constant to the saner pleasures of conversation and tea, had disposed themselves round and about Lady Isabel's tea-table, were of the inner circle of the friends of the house, and owned, as is usually the case where habits and environment are practically identical, a common point of view, and no more diversity of opinion than is enough to stimulate conversation. Such of them as had compelled husbands or sons to accompany them, had shaken them off at the lawn tennis ground, and though loud cawings from the hall indicated that certain of the more elderly males had congregated there, the ladies in the drawing-room had, so far, been "unmolested by either the young people or the men."