'Then you are Miss Barton?'
'Yes, I am Miss Barton; do you know father or mother?'
'No, no; but I have heard the name in Galway. I was spending a few days with one of your neighbours.'
'Oh, really!' said Alice, a little embarrassed; for she knew it must have been with the Lawlers that he had been staying. At the end of a long silence she said:
'I am afraid you have chosen a rather unfortunate time for visiting Ireland. All these terrible outrages, murders, refusals to pay rent; I wonder you have not been frightened away.'
'As I do not possess a foot of land—I believe I should say "not land enough to sod a lark"—my claim to collect rent would rest on even a slighter basis than that of the landlords; and as, with the charming inconsistency of your race, you have taken to killing each other instead of slaughtering the hated Saxon, I really feel safer in Ireland than elsewhere. I suppose,' he said, 'you do a great deal of novel-reading in the country?'
'Oh yes,' she answered, with almost an accent of voluptuousness in her voice; 'I spent the winter reading.'
'Because there was no hunting?' replied Harding, with a smile full of cynical weariness.
'No, I assure you, no; I do not think I should have gone out hunting even if it hadn't been stopped,' said Alice hastily; for it vexed her not a little to see that she was considered incapable of loving a book for its own sake.
'And what do you read?'