"Did ye, now?" replied the other, looking somewhat disconcerted. "And does he ride often with you in London—up and down the Park, as they call it? How I'd long for a gallop in a place like that, where they never go out of a walk!"
Blanche was obliged to admit that such rides, though proposed very frequently, came off but rarely, and Norah seemed in no way dissatisfied with this confession.
"When he's here, now," she said, "if there isn't a hunt to be got up, we gallop all over the country-side, him and me, the same as if we'd a fox and a pack of hounds before us. It's him that taught me the real right way to hold the bridle, and I never could manage papa's Orville horse till he showed me how. It's not likely I'd forget anything Daisy told me! Here we are at the waterfall. Come off the rock now, or ye'll not have a dry thread on ye in five minutes!"
Miss Douglas, keeping back a good deal of vexation, had the good sense to follow her guide's advice, and leaped lightly down amongst the shingle from the broad flat rock to which she had sprung, as affording a view of the cascade.
It was a fine sight, no doubt. Swelled by the spring rains, and increased by many little tributaries from the neighbouring hills, a considerable volume of water came tumbling over a ledge of bold bare rock, to roar and brawl and circle round a basin fifty feet below, not less than ten feet deep, from which it escaped in sheets of foam over certain shallows, till it was lost in a black narrow gorge, crowned by copses already budding and blooming with the first smiles of spring.
"We're mighty proud of the Dabble in these parts," observed Norah Macormac, when she had withdrawn her friend from the showers of spray that quivered in faint and changing rainbows under the sunshine. "There's not such a river for fish anywhere this side the Shannon. And where there's fish there's mostly fishers. See, now; Captain Walters killed one of nine pounds and a half in the bend by the dead stump there. He'd have lost him only for little Thady Brallaghan and me hurrying to fetch the gaff, and I held it while we landed the beast on the gravel below the rocks."
It was getting unbearable! Blanche had started in such good spirits, full of life and hope, enjoying the air, the scenery, the exercise; but with every word that fell from her companion's lips the landscape faded, the skies turned grey, the very turf beneath her feet seemed to have lost its elasticity. Norah Macormac could not but perceive the change; attributing it, however, to fatigue, and blaming herself severely for thus tempting a helpless London girl into an expedition beyond her strength,—anticipating, at the same time, her mother's displeasure for that which good Lady Mary would consider a breach of the laws of hospitality,—"Sure ye're tired," said she, offering to carry the other's parasol, which might have weighed a pound. "It's myself I blame, to have brought you such a walk as this, and you not used to it, may be, like us that live up here amongst the hills."
But Blanche clung to her parasol, and repudiated the notion of fatigue. "She had never enjoyed a walk so much. It was lovely scenery, and a magnificent waterfall. She had no idea there was anything so fine in Ireland. She would have gone twice the distance to see it. Tired! She wasn't a bit tired, and believed she might be quite as good a walker as Miss Macormac."
There were times when Miss Douglas felt her nickname not altogether undeserved. She became Satanella now to the core.
Luncheon was on the table when the young ladies got back to the castle, and although several of the guests had absented themselves, the General took his place with those who remained. St. Josephs was not in the best of humours, for a solitary walk in a strange district which had failed in its object. He sat, as it would seem, purposely a long way from Miss Douglas, and the servants were already clearing away before he tried to catch her eye. What he saw, or how he gathered from an instantaneous glance that his company was more welcome now than it had been at breakfast, is one of those mysteries on which it seems useless to speculate; but he never left her side again during the afternoon.