k to-morrow, and visit that part of the coast."

"You are forgetting you are to call on Mrs. Butler."

"So I was. At what hour are we to be here?"

"There is no question of 'we' in the matter; your modesty must make its
advances alone."

"You are not angry with me, _cariasima_ Rebecca?"

"Don't think that a familiarity is less a liberty because it is dressed
in a foreign tongue."

"But it would 'out;' the expression forced itself from my lips in spite
of me, just as some of the sharp things you have been saying to me were
perfectly irrepressible?"

"I suspect you like this sort of sparring?"

"Delight in it"

"So do I. There's only one condition I make: whenever you mean to take
off the gloves, and intend to hit out hard, that you 'll say so before.
Is that agreed?"

"It's a bargain."

She held out her hand frankly, and he took it as cordially; and in a
hearty squeeze the compact was ratified.

"Shall I tell you," said she, as they drew nigh the Abbey, "that you are
a great puzzle to us all here? We none of us can guess how so great
a person as yourself should condescend to come down to such an
out-o'-the-world spot, and waste his fascinations on such dull company."

"Your explanation, I 'll wager, was the true one: let me hear it."

"I called it eccentricity; the oddity of a man who had traded so long
in oddity that he grew to be inexplicable, even to himself, and that an
Irish country-house was one of the few things you had not 'done,' and
that you were determined to 'do' it."

"There was that, and something more," said Maitland, thoughtfully.

"The 'something more' being, I take it, the whole secret."

"As you read me like a book, Miss Rebecca, all I ask is, that you 'll
shut the volume when you 've done with it, and not talk over it with
your literary friends."

"It is not my way," said she, half pettishly; and they reached the door
as she spoke.

CHAPTER VIII. SOME EXPLANATIONS

If there was anything strange or inexplicable in the appearance of one
of Maitland's pretensions in an unfrequented and obscure part of the
world,--if there was matter in it to puzzle the wise heads of squires,
and make country intelligences look confused,--there is no earthly
reason why any mystification should be practised with our reader. He, at
least, is under our guidance, and to him we impart whatever is known to
ourselves. For a variety of reasons, some of which this history later on
will disclose,--othe