"The first after all these years; and the, _last_--you remember it? It was terrible. Am I unreasonable if I remember it?"

"It was a cruel letter," says he slowly; "to forget it would be impossible, either for you or me. But, as I said just now, how does it affect us? You have me, and I have you; and they, those foolish old people, they have----" He pauses abruptly, and then goes on in a changed tone, "their memories."

"Oh! and sad ones!" cries she, sharply, as if hurt. "It is a terrible picture you have conjured up. You and I so happy, and they--Oh! _poor_ old people!"

"They have wronged you--slighted you--ill-treated you," says he, looking at her.

"But they are unhappy; they must be wretched always about your brother, their _first_ child. Oh! what a grief is theirs!"

"What a heart is _yours_!" says he, drawing her to him. "Barbara! surely I shall not die until they have met you, and learned why I love you."

CHAPTER III.

"It was a lover and his la.s.s With a hey and a ho, and a hey-nonino!

That o'er the green cornfield did pa.s.s In the Spring-time, the only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing hey-ding-a-ding, Sweet lovers love the Spring."

Joyce is running through the garden, all the sweet wild winds of heaven playing round her. They are a little wild still. It is the end of lovely May, but though languid Summer is almost with us, a suspicion of her more sparkling sister Spring fills all the air.

Miss Kavanagh has caught up the tail of her gown, and is flying as if for dear life. Behind her come the foe, fast and furious. Tommy, indeed, is now dangerously close at her heels, armed with a ferocious-looking garden fork, his face crimson, his eyes glowing with the ardor of the chase; Mabel, much in the background, is making a bad third.

Miss Kavanagh is growing distinctly out of breath. In another moment Tommy will have her. By this time he has fully worked himself into the belief that he is a Red Indian, and she his lawful prey, and is prepared to make a tomahawk of his fork, and having felled her, to scalp her _somehow_, when Providence shows her a corner round a rhododendron bush that may save her for the moment. She makes for it, gains it, turns it, dashes round it, and _all but_ precipitates herself into the arms of a young man who has been walking leisurely towards her.

He is a tall young man, not strictly handsome, but decidedly good to look at, with honest hazel eyes, and a shapely head, and altogether very well set up. As a rule he is one of the most cheerful people alive, and a tremendous favorite in his regiment, the ---- Hussars, though just now it might suggest itself to the intelligent observer that he considers he has been hardly used. A very little more haste, and that precipitation _must_ have taken place. He had made an instinctive movement towards her with protective arms outstretched; but though a little cry had escaped her, she had maintained her balance, and now stands looking at him with laughing eyes, and panting breath, and two pretty hands pressed against her bosom.

Mr. Dysart lets his disappointed arms fall to his sides, and a.s.sumes the aggrieved air of one who has been done out of a good thing.

"You!" says she, when at last she can speak.

"I suppose so," returns he discontentedly. He might just as well have been anyone else, or anywhere else--such a chance--and _gone_!

"Never were you so welcome!" cries she, dodging behind him as Tommy, fully armed, and all alive, comes tearing round the corner. "Ah, ha, Tommy, _sold_! I've got a champion now. I'm no longer shivering in my shoes. Mr. Dysart will protect me--_won't_ you, Mr. Dysart?" to the young man, who says "yes" without stirring a muscle. The heaviest bribe would not have induced him to move, because, standing behind him, she has laid her dainty fingers on his shoulders, from which safe position she mocks at Tommy with security. Were the owners of the shoulders to stir, the owners of the fingers might remove the delightful members.

Need it be said that, with this awful possibility before him, Mr. Dysart is prepared to die at his post rather than budge an inch.

And, indeed, death seems imminent. Tommy charging round the rhododendron, finding himself robbed of his expected scalp, grows frantic, and makes desperate pa.s.ses at Mr. Dysart's legs, which that hero, being determined, as I have said, not to stir under any provocation, circ.u.mvents with a considerable display of policy, such as:

"I say, Tommy, old boy, is that you? How d'ye do? Glad to see me, aren't you?" This last very artfully with a view to softening the attacks. "You don't know what I've brought you!" This is more artful still, and distinctly a swindle, as he has brought him nothing, but on the spot he determines to redeem himself with the help of the small toy-shops and sweety shops down in the village. "Put down that fork like a good boy, and let me tell you how----"

"Oh, _bother_ you!" says Tommy, indignantly. "I'd have had her only for you! What brought you here now? Couldn't you have waited a bit?"

"Yes! what brought you?" says Miss Kavanagh, most disgracefully going over to the other side, now that danger is at an end, and Tommy has planted his impromptu tomahawk in a bed close by.

"Do you want to know?" says he quickly.

The fingers have been removed from his shoulders, and he is now at liberty to turn round and look at the charming face beside him.

"No, no!" says she, shaking her head. "I've been rude, I suppose. But it is such a wonderful thing to see you here so soon again."

"Why should I not be here?"

"Of course! That is the one unanswerable question. But you must confess it is puzzling to those who thought of you as being elsewhere."

"If you are one of 'those' you fill me with grat.i.tude. That you should think of me even for a moment----"

"Well, I haven't been thinking much," says she, frankly, and with the most delightful if scarcely satisfactory little smile: "I don't believe I was thinking of you at all, until I turned the corner just now, and then, I confess, I was startled, because I believed you at the Antipodes."

"Perhaps your belief was mother to your thought."

"Oh, no. Don't make me out so nasty. Well, but _were_ you there?"

"Perhaps so. Where are they?" asks he gloomily. "One hears a good deal about them, but they comprise so many places that now-a-days one is hardly sure where they exactly lie. At all events no one has made them clear to me."

"Does it rest with me to enlighten you?" asks she, with a little aggravating half glance from under her long lashes; "well--the North Pole, Kamtschatka, Smyrna, Timbuctoo, Maoriland, Margate----"

"We'll stop there, I think," says he, with a faint grimace.

"There! At Margate? No, thanks. _You_ can, if you like, but as for me----"

"I don't suppose you would stop anywhere with me," says he. "I have occasional glimmerings that I hope mean common sense. No, I have not been so adventurous as to wander towards Margate. I have only been to town and back again."

"What town?"

"Eh? What town?" says he astonished. "_London_, you know."

"No, I don't know," says Miss Kavanagh, a little petulantly. "One would think there was only one town in the world, and that all you English people had the monopoly of it. There are other towns, I suppose. Even we poor Irish insignificants have a town or two. Dublin comes under that head, I suppose?"

"Undoubtedly. Of _course_," making great haste to abase himself. "It is mere sn.o.bbery our making so much of London. A kind of despicable cant, you know."

"Well, after all, I expect it is a big place in every way," says Miss Kavanagh, so far mollified by his submission as to be able to allow him something.

"It's a desert," says Tommy, turning to his aunt, with all the air of one who is about to impart to her useful information. "It's raging with wild beasts. They roam to and fro and are at their wits' ends----" here Tommy, who is great on Bible history, but who occasionally gets mixed, stops short. "Father says they're there," he winds up defiantly.

"Wild beasts!" echoes Mr. Dysart, bewildered. "Is _this_ the teaching about their Saxon neighbors that the Irish children receive at the hands of their parents and guardians. Oh, well, come now, Tommy, really, you know----"

"Yes; they are there," says Tommy, rebelliously. "_Frightful_ beasts!

_Bears!_ They'd tear you in bits if they could get at you. They have no reason in them, father says. And they climb up posts, and roar at people."

"Oh, nonsense!" says Mr. Dysart. "One would think we were having a French Revolution all over again in England. Don't you think," glancing severely at Joyce, who is giving way to unrestrained mirth, "that it is not only wrong, but dangerous, to implant such ideas about the English in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Irish children? There isn't a word of truth in it, Tommy."

"There _is_!" says Monkton, junior, wagging his head indignantly.

"Father _told_ me."

"Father told us," repeats the small Mabel, who has just come up.

"And father says, too, that the reason that they are so wicked is because they want their freedom!" says Tommy, as though this is an unanswerable argument.