me plan in her head which did not concern my
welfare at all. Why should she, a great lady, take any trouble for a
poor devil who was living at an inn on money borrowed from a
highwayman. I had been highly honoured by an indifferent
consideration born of a wish to be polite to a man who had eased the
mind of her father. No; I would not deceive myself.

But her tears! Were they marking indifferent consideration? For a
second I lost myself in a roseate impossible dream. I dreamed that she
had spoken to me because she--

Oh, what folly! Even as I dreamed, she turned to me with splendid
carriage, and remarked coldly:

"I did not wish you to suppose that I ever failed to pay a debt. I
have paid this one. Proceed now, sir, in your glowing stupidity. I
have done."

When I recovered myself she was placidly moving away from me toward
the door of the inn.

CHAPTER IX

I had better be getting to the story of the duel. I have been hanging
back with it long enough, and I shall tell it at once. I remember my
father saying that the most aggravating creature in life was one who
would be keeping back the best part of a story through mere reasons of
trickery, although I have seen himself dawdle over a tale until his
friends wished to hurl the decanters at him. However, there can be no
doubting of the wisdom of my father's remark. Indeed there can be
little doubting of the wisdom of anything that my father said in life,
for he was a very learned man. The fact that my father did not
invariably defer to his own opinions does not alter the truth of those
opinions in my judgment, since even the greatest of philosophers is
more likely to be living a life based on the temper of his wife and
the advice of his physician than on the rules laid down in his books.
Nor am I certain that my father was in a regular habit of delaying a
story. I only remember this one incident, wherein he was recounting a
stirring tale of a fight with a lancer, and just as the lance was
within an inch of the paternal breast my father was reminded, by a
sight of the walnuts, that Mickey Clancy was not serving the port with
his usual rapidity, and so he addressed him. I remember the words
well.

"Mickey, you spalpeen," said my father, "would you be leaving the
gentlemen as dry as the bottom of Moses' feet when he crossed the Red
Sea? Look at O'Mahoney there! He is as thirsty as a fish in the top of
a tree. And Father Donovan has had but two small quarts, a