"Oh, they learn everything—from the servants I suppose."
"Of course, the mean creatures!" said Mrs. Townsend, forgetting, probably, her own little conversation with her own man of all work that morning. "But go on, Æneas."
"'What has happened,' said I, 'at Castle Richmond?' 'Oh, you haven't heard,' said he. And I was obliged to own that I had not, though I saw that it gave him a kind of triumph. 'Why,' said he, 'very bad news has reached them indeed; the worst of news.' And then he told me about Lady Fitzgerald. To give him his due, I must say that he was very sorry—very sorry. 'The poor young fellow!' he said—'The poor young fellow!' And I saw that he turned away his face to hide a tear."
"Crocodile tears!" said Mrs. Townsend.
"No, they were not," said her reverend lord; "and Father Barney is not so bad as I once thought him."
"I hope you are not going over too, Æneas?" And his consort almost cried as such a horrid thought entered her head. In her ideas any feeling short of absolute enmity to a servant of the Church of Rome was an abandonment of some portion of the Protestant basis of the Church of England. "The small end of the wedge," she would call it, when people around her would suggest that the heart of a Roman Catholic priest might possibly not be altogether black and devilish.
"Well, I hope not, my dear," said Mr. Townsend, with a slight touch of sarcasm in his voice. "But, as I was saying, Father Barney told me then that this Mr. Prendergast—"
"Oh, I had known of his being there from the day of his coming."
"This Mr. Prendergast, it seems, knew the whole affair, from beginning to end."
"But how did he know it, Æneas?"