bleness of instinct rather than by the more
wandering light that is reason. Mr. Barton, who it was feared might talk
of painting, and so distract the attention from more serious matters,
was left in Galway, and amid eight or nine men collected here, there,
and everywhere out of the hotels and barrack-rooms, the three ladies sat
down to dinner.

Mrs. Barton, who could have talked to twenty men, and have kept them
amused, was severely handicapped by the presence of her daughters.
Olive, at the best of times, could do little more than laugh; and as
Alice never had anything to say to the people she met at her mother's
house, the silences that hung over the Mount Street dinner-table were
funereal in intensity and length. From time to time questions were asked
relating to the Castle, the weather, and the theatre.

Therefore, beyond the fact that neither Lord Kilcarney nor Mr. Harding
was present, the girls passed their second season in the same manner as
their first. _Les deux pieces de resistance_ at Mount Street were a
dissipated young English lord and a gouty old Irish distiller, and Mrs.
Barton was making every effort to secure one of these. A pianist was
ordered to attend regularly at four o'clock. And now if Alice was
relieved of the duty of spelling through the doleful strains of 'Dream
Faces,' she was forced to go round and round with the distiller until an
extra glass of port forced the old gentleman to beg mercy of Mrs.
Barton. At one o'clock in the morning the young lord used to enter the
Kildare Street Club weary. But not much way was made with either, and
when one returned to London and the other to a sick-bed, Olive abandoned
herself to a series of flirtations. At the Castle she danced with all
who asked her, and she sat out dances in the darkest corners of the most
distant rooms with every officer stationed in Dublin. Mrs. Barton never
refused an invitation to any dance, no matter how low, and in all the
obscure 'afternoons' in Mount Street and Pembroke Street Olive's blonde
cameo-like face was seen laughing with every official of Cork Hill and
the gig-men of Kildare Street.

In May the Bartons went abroad, and Olive flirted with foreign
titles--French Counts, Spanish Dukes, Russian Princes, Swedish noblemen
of all kinds, and a goodly number of English refugees with
irreproachable neckties and a taste for baccarat. In the balmy gardens
of Ostend and Boulogne, jubilant with June and the overture of
Masaniello