"He might, miss. It's the very time you'd wish him aisy in his mind that he gets raal troublesome. An' I feel just as if he was in the stable this blessid minit lookin' at the poor baste, an' swearin' he'll have the life uv me."
"And I feel just as if he had gone quietly to bed," says
Mona, pleasantly, turning away.
But Mickey is not to be outdone. "An' there's the pigs, miss," he begins again, presently.
"What's the matter with them?" says Mona, with some pardonable impatience.
"I didn't give them their supper yet, miss; an' it's very bad for the young ones to be left starvin'. It's on me mind, miss, so that I can't even enjoy me pipe, and it's fresh baccy I have an' all, an' it might as well be dust for what comfort I get from it. Them pigs is callin' for me now like Christians: I can a'most hear them."
"I shouldn't think deafness is in your family," says Geoffrey, genially.
"No, sir; it isn't, sir. We're none of us hard of hearin' glory be to——. Miss Mona," coaxingly, "sure, it's only a step to the house: wouldn't Misther Rodney see ye home now, just for wanst?"
"Why, yes, of course he can," says Mona, without the smallest hesitation. She says it quite naturally, and as though it was the most usual thing in the world for a young man to see a young woman home, through dewy fields and beneath "mellow moons," at half-past ten at night. It is now fully nine, and she cannot yet bear to turn her back upon the enchanting scene before her. Surely in another hour or so it will be time enough to think of home and all other such prosaic facts.
"Thin I may go, miss?" says Mickey.