"I wouldn't at all doubt her!" said the cook, saturninely, "But what's the drawn'-room carpet to conjuring a supper out of me pocket in five minutes? I ask you that, Eliza Hosford!"
None the less, with that deep loyalty to the honour of the house that is a feature in Irish domestic life as wonderful as it is touching, the staff of Coppinger's Court were resolved that—as they say in China—the face of Master Larry should not be blackened, and The Riff-Raff of Cluhir were served with a ceremony and a success that left nothing to be desired.
Dr. Mangan sat in a very large armchair in front of a big fire of logs, in the hall, and smoked meditatively, and was seemingly quite unaware of the couples who moved past him between the dances, passing out through the open hall-door into the moon-lit May night. He did not even raise an eyelid when his daughter sailed by him, as she did many times, with the ostentation of the young lady who is aware that her prowess is the subject of comment, in company, alternately, with the two captives of her bow and spear who had offered so feeble a resistance to those weapons. Tishy and her father alike ascribed her victory to that redoubtable and already creditably battle-scarred bow and spear; they neither of them recognised the acknowledgments that were due to a certain powerful ally, the May moon. She had stolen up the sky at the back of the woods. The first Larry knew of her was the vast, incredible, pale disc behind the topmost boughs of the pine trees, so near that it seemed to him as though the crooked black branches alone were holding her back, and that her white fire that was pouring through them must consume them, "and then it will be our turn," he said, seriously, and without preamble, to Tishy.
"Our turn for what?" asked Tishy, very naturally.
"Our turn to be resolved into moonshine. You'll see me fading away into silver smoke in a minute," replied Larry. "Let's get out of this, I'm getting frightened! Hold my hand tight!"
"Go on with your nonsense!" said Tishy. "And will you tell me how can I hold your hand when it's round my waist?"
Which was reasonable enough, and may be taken as a sufficient indication of what the moon was already responsible for.
A point of red light moved in the darkness above the seat under the laurels, to which they were repairing, and the scent of a Virginian cigarette was wafted to them.
"Who's that?" Tishy whispered, pressing nearer to Larry; but she was agreeably certain that it was the gloomy and misanthropic Captain Cloherty, whose place of refuge they had invaded.
Christian, meanwhile, unlike Captain Cloherty, was conscientiously endeavouring to enjoy herself, and was finding that the wheels of the chariot of pleasure drave heavily. That Barty Mangan was a good dancer was an alleviation, but among those stigmatised by Eliza Hosford as the riff-raff of Cluhir, those now forgotten measures of the first years of this century, the prancing barn-dance, the capering pas-de-quatre, lent themselves to a violence that, even at the uncritical age of eighteen, Christian found overpowering. "They danced like the Priests of Baal," she told Judith. "One expected to see them cut themselves with knives!"