itself, my Lord, but in the bag that houlds
it."

"Oh yes, I remember the explanation perfectly; so you thought you'd just
come abroad for a little distraction."

"Distraction indeed! 'tis the very word for it," broke in Mr. O'Reilly,
eagerly. "My head is bewildered between the lingo and the money, and
they keep telling me, 'You'll get used to it, papa, darling--you'll be
quite at home yet.' But how is that ever possible?"

"Still, for your charming girls' sake," said my Lord, caressing
his whiskers and adjusting his neckcloth, as if for immediate
captivation--"or their sake, O'Reilly, you've done perfectly right!"

"Well, I'm glad your Lordship says so. 'Tis nobody ought to know
better!" said he, with a heavy sigh.

"They really deserve every cultivation. All the advantages
that--that--that sort of thing can bestow!"

And his Lordship smiled benignly, as though offering his own aid to the
educational system.

"What they said to me was this," said O'Reilly, dropping his voice to a
tone of the most confiding secrecy: "'Don't be keeping them down here
in Mary's Abbey, but take them where they'll see life. You can give
them forty thousand pounds between them, Tim O'Reilly, and with that and
their own good looks---'"

"Beauty, O'Reilly---downright loveliness," broke in my Lord.

"Well, indeed, they are handsome," said O'Reilly, with an honest
satisfaction, "and that's exactly why I thought the advice was good.
'Take them abroad,' they said; 'take them into Germany and Italy--but
more especially Italy'--for they say there's nothing like Italy for
finishing young ladies."

"That is certainly the general impression!" said his Lordship with the
barest imaginable motion of his nether lip.

"And here we are, but where we're going afterwards, and what well
do when we're there, that thief of a Courier we have may know, but I
don't."

"So that you gave up business, O'Reilly, and resigned yourself freely to
a life of ease," said my Lord, with a smile that seemed to approve the
project.

"Yes, indeed, my Lord; but whether it's to be a life of pleasure, I
don't know. I was in the provision trade thirty-eight years, and do you
know I miss the pigs greatly."

"Every man has a hankering of that sort. Old cosmopolite as I am, I have
every now and then my longing for that window at Brookes's, and that
snug dinner-room at Boodle's."

"Yes, my Lord," said O'Reilly, who hadn't the faintest conception
whether these localit