Miss Dopping was a lady who never allowed anything to interfere with her plans. When she fixed an hour for her arrival or departure, nothing less than an earthquake could alter her arrangements. At ten o’clock, the morning after the dance, she and her protégée were trotting smartly down the Roskeen avenue, behind a pair of posters, en route home. Strange to say, Mr. Holroyd made a pretext for returning to Ballingoole the following day, although pressed to remain for a most tempting meet. When he had taken his leave, Fred Moore imparted some of his ideas to his brother, over a quiet cigar in the smoking-room.
“I tell you what, Ghosty, that chap Holroyd is head over ears in love with Betty Redmond.”
“Not he,” returned his brother, contemptuously. “It’s Belle you are thinking of; did you not see him dancing with her, and towing the mother in to supper? What an old woman she is; she reminds me of a walrus shuffling about in black satin.”
“Belle asked Holroyd to dance. She has brass enough for anything, and she told him off to her mother.”
“He is always at Noone,” persisted Ghosty, “and every one says that he is after Belle; why, Betty is a mere child; it was only the other day she went into long dresses.”
“Child or not, when I went into the oak room the night of the ball, I started a fine covey, or I’m greatly mistaken. He was leaning towards her, speaking as if his life and soul depended on her answer, and her face was as red as fire. She ate no supper, not even lobster salad, and strawberry ice! That’s a very bad sign in a girl.”
But to all this his brother Augustus turned a scornful face, and a deaf ear.
Foxy Joe was no friend to Denis Malone. Denis laughed at him openly, and made a butt of him at Nolan’s, and Foxy Joe was fully resolved “to have it in for him,” as he expressed it, “yet,” although he carried his messages meanwhile, and took his money; for that matter he took every one’s messages, from dainty little pink notes from Noone, to a couple of pounds of steak for Mrs. Maccabe. She was his most constant patroness, and he saw a good deal of her, and her niece and book-keeper, pretty Lizzie, who looked so demure, as she sat behind a kind of railed-in desk, peering through the bars, with her bright dark eyes, and shovelling out greasy coppers, with her lady-like white fingers.
“A good girl,” said her aunt, in confidence to Jane Bolland (consequently in confidence to the town), “with a great head for figures, and worth her weight in gold, and though I’m against cousins marrying, if she and Dan were to set up together, it would not be a bad thing, and she might drop into my shoes!” Ridiculous idea! as if coquettish Lizzie, with her smart dresses and high heels, would ever harangue her customers in a black poke bonnet, much less wield the ox tail with a vigorous arm, and personally visit the slaughter yard!