go before
him, and th' eye he cast at her! I thought he'd beat me, too!"

"Oh, and is a boy all he is then?" said Mrs. Mangan, with relief in
her voice: "you'd think by the work your father had 'twas the Lord
Leftenant was in it! Run away now, Tishy, like a good girl, and get
those clothes off you, and help Hannah with Barty's room. Boy or man
or whatever he is, he must have a bed under him!"

It was a very deplorable boy who presently arrived at No. 6, The Mall,
Cluhir, and was practically lifted off the car by the Big Doctor.
Francis Aloysius Mangan had many aspects of character of an
undesirable kind, but they were linked with one virtue, the Irish
gift, of a good-natured heart. With his enormous thick hands, that
made Larry think of a tiger's paws, he undressed the boy as cleverly
and gently as he had set the broken bones of his wrist. Mrs. Mangan
and Hannah had not failed; the soup and the jars were, as the latter
authority had pronounced, "as hot as love," similarly passioned was
the ardour of the whisky-punch, with which the proceedings had opened.
Combined with a subsequent sleeping-draught, it conferred the boon of
sleep, and for some hours, at all events, Larry forgot his
recently-acquired knowledge of what pain was. But not for many hours.
In the long darkness of the winter morning he lay with a fast mounting
temperature, while he made the discovery, common to all in his case,
that upon the particular bone that has been broken, the entire
existence pivots. And, in addition to the broken bone, by the time
that Miss Frederica had driven in from Coppinger's Court, there was
but little doubt that what Dr. Mangan called, lightly, "a touch of
pneumonia," would keep young Mr. Coppinger in Barty's room for a time
unspecified.

Miss Frederica drove home again in a seriously perturbed frame of
mind, and with indignation against the decrees of Providence hot
within her.

"I wired for a nurse for him!" she said to Lady Isabel, "I could not
plant myself upon them! It's all _most_ uncomfortable and
unavoidable. Of course they've been extremely kind--"

At the back of Miss Coppinger's mind was the wish, that she trampled
on whenever it stirred, that the Mangans had been less unexceptionally
kind and Good Samaritan-like. "Such an obligation!" she groaned;
"they've turned their own son out of the house to make room for Larry!
But oh, my dear Isabel, if you could imagine what the house is like!
The untidiness! The dirt!