teaming stew--sufficient to feed ten hungry
people--that Hannah, acting in Burke's absence, had planted heavily
upon the table.

"We always begin lunch with meat," Clodagh explained; "but we always
finish with tea and whatever Hannah will make for us to eat. If you
stay long enough you'll be able to tell all Hannah's tempers by what we
get at lunch. When she's terribly cross we have bread and jam; when
she's middling we get soda bread; but when she's really and truly nice
we have currant loaf or griddle cake!"

She glanced round mischievously at the red face of the factotum.

Hannah, who had been wavering between offence and amusement, suddenly
succumbed to the look.

"Sure, 'tis a quare notion you'll be givin' him of the place," she
said, amicably joining in the conversation without a shade of
embarrassment. "If I was you, I wouldn't be tellin' a gintleman that I
laves the whole work of the house to wan poor ould woman, an' goes
galavantin' over the country mornin', noon, an' night, instead of
learnin' meself to be a good housekeeper! So signs, 'tis Miss Nance
that'll find the husband first!" With a knowing glance at Milbanke and
a shake of the head she left the room, banging the door behind her.

Clodagh laughed. The insinuation in Hannah's words and look passed
unnoticed by her. She swept them aside unconcernedly, and proceeded
with an inborn tact--an inborn sense of the responsibilities of her
position--to fill her _role_ of hostess and entertain her guest.

So successful was she in this new aspect, that Milbanke found himself
thawing--even growing communicative under her influence as the meal
progressed. Long before the appetising griddle cake and the heavy
silver teapot had been laid upon the table he had begun to feel at
home; to meet Nance's shy, friendly smiles without embarrassment; to
talk with freedom and naturalness of his small, personal ambitions, his
own unimportant, individual researches in his pet study of antiquity.

A reticent man--when once his reticence has been broken down--makes as
egotistical a confidant as any other. Before they rose from the table,
he had been beguiled into forgetting that the Celtic zeal for the
entertainment of a guest may sometimes be mistaken for something more;
that Irish children--with their natural kinship to sun and rain, dogs
and horses, men and women--may assume, but cannot possibly feel, an
interest in monuments of wood or stone, no matter how historic or how