'No matter for that; and even if you had not a single bet upon you, Ulick's conduct, in the beginning, deserved little favour at your hands.'
'I confess,' said I, 'that there you have touched on the saving clause to my feeling of shame. Had Mr. Burke conducted himself in a different spirit towards my friend and myself, I should feel sorely puzzled this minute.'
'Quite right, quite right,' said Dillon; 'and now try if you can't make as much haste with your toilette as you did over the clover-field.'
Within a quarter of an hour I made my appearance in the drawing-room, now crowded with company, the faces of many among whom I remembered having seen in the morning. Mr. Dillon was a widower, but his daughters—three fine, tall, handsome-looking girls—did the honours. While I was making my bows to them, Miss Bellew came forward, and with an eye bright with pleasure held out her hand towards me.
'I told you, Mr. Hinton, we should meet in the west. Have I been as good a prophetess in saying that you would like it?'
'If it afforded me but this one minute,' said I, in a half-whisper.
'Dinner!' said the servant, and at the same moment that scene of pleasant confusion ensued that preludes the formal descent of a party to the dining-room.
The host had gracefully tucked a large lady under his arm, beside whose towering proportions he looked pretty much like what architects call 'a lean-to,' superadded to a great building. He turned his eye towards me to go and do likewise, with a significant glance at a heaving mass of bugles and ostrich feathers that sat panting on a sofa. I parried the stroke, however, by drawing Miss Bellow's arm within mine, while I resigned the post of honour to my little friend the Major.
The dinner passed off like all other dinners. There was the same routine of eating and drinking, and pretty much the same ritual of table-talk. As a kind of commentary on the superiority of natural gifts over the affected and imitated graces of society, I could not help remarking that those things which figured on the table of homely origin were actually luxurious, while the exotic resources of the cookery were, in every instance, miserable failures. Thus the fish was excellent, and the mutton perfect, while the fricandeau was atrocious, and the petits pâtés execrable.
Should my taste be criticised, that with a lovely girl beside me, for whom I already felt a strong attachment, I could thus set myself to criticise the cookery, in lieu of any other more agreeable occupation, let my apology be, that my reflection was an apropos, called forth by comparing Louisa Bellew with her cousins the Dillons. I have said they were handsome girls; they were more—they were beautiful. They had all that fine pencilling of the eyebrow, that deep, square orbit, so characteristically Irish, which gives an expression to the eye, whatever be its colour, of inexpressible softness; their voices too, albeit the accent was provincial, were soft and musical, and their manners quiet and ladylike—yet, somehow, they stood immeasurably apart from her.