"Then you may take away, Biddy; I've done with it. But it's a thousand pities such a fish should have been so wasted."
The female heart of Mrs. Townsend could stand these wrongs no longer, and with a tear in one corner of her eye, and a gleam of anger in the other, she at length thus spoke out. "I am sure then I don't know what you will eat, Mr. Carter, and I did think that all you English clergymen always ate fish in Lent,—and indeed nothing else; for indeed people do say that you are much the same as the papists in that respect."
"Hush, my dear!" said Mr. Townsend.
"Well, but I can't hush when there's nothing for the gentleman to eat."
"My dear madam, such a matter does not signify in the least," said Mr. Carter, not unbending an inch.
"But it does signify; it signifies a great deal; and so you'd know if you were a family man;"—"as you ought to be," Mrs. Townsend would have been delighted to add. "And I'm sure I sent Jerry five miles, and he was gone four hours to get that bit of fish from Paddy Magrath, as he stops always at Ballygibblin Gate; and indeed I thought myself so lucky, for I only gave Jerry one and sixpence. But they had an uncommon take of fish yesterday at Skibbereen, and—"
"One and sixpence!" said Mr. Carter, now slightly relaxing his brow for the first time.
"I'd have got it for one and three," said Mr. Townsend, upon whose mind an inkling of the truth was beginning to dawn.
"Indeed and you wouldn't, Æneas; and Jerry was forced to promise the man a glass of whisky the first time he comes this road, which he does sometimes. That fish weighed over nine pounds, every ounce of it."
"Nine fiddlesticks," said Mr. Townsend.