At another time I should probably have been inclined to lead Mrs. Burke on to more reminiscences of this gifted divine, but my sole idea now was to get away as soon as possible. I looked to see if Willy had nearly finished his tea, but found that it was still in progress; in fact, when I looked round, Miss Dennehy and Miss Horan were engaged in throwing pieces of cake into his open mouth, loud laughter announcing equally the success or failure of their aim. Willy caught my eye, and guiltily shut his mouth.
“Do you want the horses, Theo?” he said, rightly interpreting my look, and hastily getting up from the sofa, while small pieces of cake fell off him in every direction. “I’ll go round and see about them.”
“Now, you needn’t be in such a hurry, Willy,” said Miss Burke, getting up. “There’s just light enough left to show your cousin my new Plymouth Rocks. I’ve been telling her all about them; and I’ve the doatiest little house built for them in the yard! Come along, Miss Sarsfield; we’ll slip out by the greenhouse while he’s getting the horses;” and, snatching up a purple woollen antimacassar from the back of the chair, she wrapped her head and shoulders in it, and with total unconsciousness of her extraordinary appearance she led me out of the room.
The evening had grown very cold. I had felt smothered in the little drawing-room, but now I shivered as I stood by the wired enclosure in the corner of the garden, watching the much-vaunted Plymouth Rocks picking and scratching about their gravel yard, and listening with simulated intelligence to Miss Burke’s harangue upon their superiority to all other tribes of hens. Beyond the fact that hens laid eggs in greater or less profusion, I knew nothing about them. But, fortunately, Miss Mimi’s enthusiasm asked for no more than the stray word or two of ignorant praise with which I filled up her infrequent pauses.
My eyes took in, without losing any detail of absurdity, the effect of her large face and majestic nose, surmounted by the purple antimacassar, but my brain did not seem to receive any definite impression from it. Every faculty was deadened by the battle between pride and despair that was being fought out in me again. I had persuaded myself that that fight was over and done with; but now as I stood in the damp twilight, and looked at the firelit drawing-room windows, I felt that this time despair might be likely to get the mastery.
Miss Mimi’s voice broke strangely in on my thoughts.
“Well, now, wait a moment till I go round to the back,” she said. “Me greatest beauties are roosting in the house; but I must run into the kitchen for the key, and then I can get in and poke them out for you to see them.”
She went round through a door in the thick fuchsia hedge, which encircled the garden and divided it from the yard, and left me standing by myself in the chilly silence of the evening. I had almost forgotten what I was waiting there for, though it could not have been more than three or four minutes since Miss Burke left me, when I heard steps come through the yard, and the faint smell of cigarettes penetrated the hedge. A horse’s hoofs clattered on the stones as it was led out of the stable.
“Well, good-bye, Nugent,” said Willy’s voice. “Will you be away long?”
“Yes; I dare say I shall not be home for some time. I am thinking of going abroad for a bit.”