he Englishers was as water
unto wine. Pixie was entered in the school-lists as "Patricia Monica de
Vere O'Shaughnessy," but no one ever addressed her by such a title, not
even her home-people, by whom the name was considered at once as a
tragedy and a joke of the purest water.

Mrs O'Shaughnessy had held stern ideas about fanciful names for her
children, on which subject she had often waxed eloquent to her friends.

"What," she would ask, "could be more trying to a large and bouncing
young woman than to find herself saddled for life with the title of
`Ivy,' or for a poor anaemic creature to pose as `Ruby' before a
derisive world?" She christened her own first daughter Bridget, and the
second Joan, and the three boys respectively Jack, Miles, and Patrick,
resolutely waving aside suggestions of more poetic names even when they
touched her fancy, or appealed to her imagination. Better err on the
safe side, and safeguard oneself from the risk of having a brood of
plain, awkward children masquerading through life under names which made
them a laughing-stock to their companions.

So she argued; but as the years passed by, it became apparent that her
children had too much respect for the traditions of the race to appear
an any such unattractive guise. "The O'Shaughnessys were always
beautiful," quoth the Major, tossing his own handsome head with the air
of supreme self-satisfaction which was his leading characteristic, "and
it's not my children that are going to break the rule," and certain it
is that one might have travelled far and wide before finding another
family to equal the one at Knock Castle in point of appearance. The
boys were fine upstanding fellows with dark eyes and aquiline features;
Bridgie was a dainty, fair-haired little lady; while Joan, (Esmeralda
for short, as her brothers had it), had reached such a climax of beauty
that strangers gasped with delight, and the hardest heart softened
before her baby smile. Well might Mrs O'Shaughnessy waver in her
decision; well might she suppose that she was safe in relaxing her
principles sufficiently to bestow upon baby number six a name more
appropriate to prospective beauty and charm. The most sensible people
have the most serious relapses, and once having given rein to her
imagination nothing less than three names would satisfy her--and those
three the high-sounding Patricia Monica de Vere.

She was an ugly baby. Well, but babies often were ugly. That coun