"Portraits of their mother," said Rupert, bringing his critical survey to a close, and stepping forward with a nice action of the legs to present his arm to his aunt. "Portraits of their mother both of them—I trust to that miniature which used to grace our collection in the drawing-room rather than to the treacherous memory of a school-boy for the impression—but portraits by different masters and in different moods."
There was something patronising in the tone from so young a man, which Molly resented on the spot.
"Oh, we should be as like as two peas, only that we are as different as day and night, as Tanty says," she retorted, tossing her white chin at her host, while Miss O'Donoghue laughed aloud at her favourite's sauciness.
"And after all," said Rupert, as he bestowed his venerable relative on her chair, with an ineffable air of politeness, contradicted, though only for an instant, by the look which he shot at Molly from the light hazel eyes, "Tanty is not so far wrong—the only difference between night and day is the difference between the brunette and the blonde," with a little bow to each of the sisters, "an Irish bull, if one comes to analyse it, is but the expression of the too rapid working of quick wits."
"Faith, nephew," said Tanty, sitting down in high good humour to the innumerable good things in which her Epicurean old soul delighted, "that is about as true a thing as ever you said. Our Irish tongues are apt to get behind a thing before it is there, and they call that making a bull."
Rupert's sense of humour was as keen as most of his other faculties, and at the unconscious humour of this sally his laugh rang out frankly, while Molly and Madeleine giggled in their plates, and Miss O'Donoghue chuckled quietly to herself in the intervals of eating and drinking, content to have been witty, without troubling to discover how.
Sophia alone remained unmoved by mirth; indeed, as she raised her drooping head, amazed at the clamour, an unwary tear trickled down her long nose into her tea. She was given to revelling in anniversaries of dead and gone joys or sorrows; the one as melancholy to her to look back upon as the other; and upon this November day, now very many years ago, had the ardent, consumptive rector first hinted at his love.
"And now," said Miss O'Donoghue, who, having disposed of the most serious part of the breakfast, pushed away her plate with one hand while she stirred her second cup of well-creamed tea lazily with the other, "Now, Rupert, will you tell me the arrangements you propose to make to enable me to see your good brother?"
Rupert had anticipated being attacked upon this subject, and had fully prepared himself to defend the peculiar position it was his interest to maintain. To encourage a meeting between his brother and the old lady (to whom the present position of affairs was a grievous offence) did not, certainly, enter into his plan of action; but Tanty had put the question in an unexpected and slightly awkward shape, and for a second or two he hesitated before replying.
"I fear," said he then, gliding into the subject with his usual easy fluency, "that you will be disappointed if you have been reckoning upon an interview with Adrian, my dear aunt. The hermit will not be drawn from his shell on any pretext."