A Gray Eye or So. In Three Volumes—Volume I

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He gave no indication of being more interested in the story than anyone present, and no one present seemed struck with it—no one, except perhaps, Miss Craven, who had entered the room late, and was thus fortunate enough to obtain the general drift of what Mr. Durdan was talking about, without having her attention diverted by his loving repetition of the phrases of local colour.

Miss Craven heard the story, laughed, glanced at her plate, and remarked with some slyness that Mr. Durdan was clearly making strides in his acquaintance with the Irish question. She then glanced—confidentially—at Edmund Airey, and finally—rather less confidentially—at Harold.

He was eating of that which was not fish, and giving a good deal of attention to it.

Miss Craven thought he was giving quite too much attention to it. She suspected that he knew more about the boat incident than he cared to express, or why should he be giving so much attention to his plate?

As for Harold himself, he was feeling that it would be something of a gratification to him if a fatal accident were to happen to Brian.

He inwardly called him a meddlesome fool. Why should he take it upon him to row the boat across the lough, when he, Harold, had been looking forward during the sleepless hours of the night, to that exercise? When he had awakened from an early morning slumber, it was with the joyous feeling that nothing could deprive him of that row across the lough.

And yet he had been deprived of it, therefore he felt some regret that, the morning being a calm one, Brian’s chances of disaster when crossing the lough were insignificant.

All the time that the judge was explaining in that lucid style which was the envy of his brethren on the Bench, how impossible it would be for the Son of Porcupine to purge himself of the contempt which was heaped upon him owing to his unseemly behaviour at a recent race meeting—the case of the son of so excellent a father as Porcupine turning out badly was jeopardizing the future of Evolution as a doctrine—Harold was trying to devise some plan that should make him independent of the interference of the boatman. He did not insist on the plan being legitimate or even reasonable; all that he felt was that he must cross the lough.

He thought of the girl whom he had seen in that atmosphere of moonlight; and somehow he came to think of her as responsible for her exquisite surroundings. There was nothing commonplace about her—that was what he felt most strongly as he noticed the excellent appetites of the young women around him. Even Miss Stafford, who hoped to be accepted as an Intellect embodied in a mere film of flesh—she went to the extreme length of cultivating a Brow—tickled her trout with the point of her fork much less tenderly than the fisherman who told her the story—with an impromptu bravura passage or two—of its capture, had done.

But the girl whom he had seen in the moonlight—whom he was yearning to see in the sunlight—was as refined as a star. “As refined as a star,” he actually murmured, when he found himself with an unlighted cigar between his fingers on that part of the terrace which afforded a fine view of the lough—the narrow part as well—his eyes were directed to the narrow part. “As refined as a star—a—”