ding 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 Phoenix 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