‘I think it was with that strange friend of yours. We were not quite agreed whether his manners were perfect, or his habits those of the well-bred world. Then we wanted to know more of him, and each was dissatisfied that the other was so ignorant; and, lastly, we were canvassing that very peculiar taste you appear to have in friends, and were wondering where you find your odd people.’
‘So then you don’t like Donogan?’ said he hurriedly.
‘Like whom? And you call him Donogan!’
‘The mischief is out,’ said he. ‘Not that I wanted to have secrets from you; but all the same, I am a precious bungler. His name is Donogan, and what’s more, it’s Daniel Donogan. He was the same who figured in the dock at, I believe, sixteen years of age, with Smith O’Brien and the others, and was afterwards seen in England in ‘59, known as a head-centre, and apprehended on suspicion in ‘60, and made his escape from Dartmoor the same year. There’s a very pretty biography in skeleton, is it not?’
‘But, my dear Dick, how are you connected with him?’
‘Not very seriously. Don’t be afraid. I’m not compromised in any way, nor does he desire that I should be. Here is the whole story of our acquaintance.’
And now he told what the reader already knows of their first meeting and the intimacy that followed it.
‘All that will take nothing from the danger of harbouring a man charged as he is,’ said she gravely.
‘That is to say, if he be tracked and discovered.’
‘It is what I mean.’