four. Will anybody except Mr. Kelly come to my assistance?"

"Oh, you're jealous because you didn't think of 'Enid' and the
carriage-horse yourself," returns that young man, with ineffable
disdain,--"or that Dolly Varden affair."

"Well, that last might do,--modified a little," says Olga, brightening.
"Mr. Ryde is enormous enough for anything. Quite an ideal Hugh."

"Quite," says Ronayne, with a smile.

"Then it has arranged itself; that is, if you agree, dear?" says Olga,
turning to Monica.

"It shall be as you wish. I mean, I know nothing about it," gently; "but
I shall like to help you if I can."

"I mean you don't object to the subject,--or Mr. Ryde?" says Olga,
kindly, unaware that Mr. Ryde has come away from the tea-table and is
now close behind her. Monica, however, sees him, and smiles courteously.

"Oh, no," she says, as in duty bound.

And then the fourth is found and grasped, and all trouble is at an end.

"_So_ glad I can now take my tea in peace," says Olga, with a sigh of
profound relief. "_Who_ would be stage-manager?"

"Ah! you don't do much of this kind of thing in Ireland, I daresay,"
says Mr. Ryde.

"What kind of thing?" asks Olga, sweetly, who doesn't like him.
"Tea-drinking?"

"No--acting--er--and that."

"I'm afraid I'm quite at sea about the '_that_,'" says Olga, shaking her
blonde head. "Perhaps we do a good deal of it, perhaps we don't. Explain
it to me."

("Awful stoopid people!--not a word of truth about their ready wit,"
says Mr. Ryde to himself at this juncture.)

"Oh, well--er--let us confine ourselves to the acting," he says, feeling
somehow at a loss. "It is new to you here, it seems."

"I certainly have never acted in my life," begins Monica; "but----"

Mrs. Bohun interrupts her.

"We are a hopelessly benighted lot," she says, making Ryde a present of
a beautiful smile. "We are sadly behind the world,--_rococo_"--shrugging
her shoulders pathetically--"to the last degree. You, Mr. Ryde, have
opened up to us possibilities never dreamt of before; touches of
civilization hitherto unknown."

"I should think in your case a very little tuition would be sufficient,"
says Ryde, with such kindly encouragement in his tone that Ronayne, who
is at Olga's feet, collapses, and from being abnormally grave breaks
into riotous laughter.

"You must teach us stage effects,--is that the proper term?--and correct
us when we betray too crass an ignorance, and--above all things, Mr.