“He’s sent a telegram for another one,” went on Mr Fanshawe; “Cupid’s messenger, you know—ha! ha! ha!”
Miss Lestrange did not go into the same convulsions of merriment. To a girl every man who presents himself in the guise of a suitor, whether he is acceptable or wildly impossible, is a sort of trinket, a personal possession—at the lowest, a scalp. A woman, whatever she may pretend, feels a kindly interest at heart for any man who admires and loses his heart to her.
Had Mr Mahony, soot bags and all, fallen honestly and wildly in love with Miss Lestrange, Miss Lestrange, while scouting and loathing and closing the doors against her dusky suitor, would still have felt for him an interest; and, had he broken his leg, the news would have been of more moment to her than the news of a similar accident befalling Mr Mullins or Billy the Buck, or any other male biped of the same species.
“Patsy,” said Miss Lestrange, “seems to have had a lot to do with our affairs; is it Fate or just—Patsy?”
“It’s accident,” replied Dicky, whom a grave thought had suddenly sobered. “Ireland is an accident factory; these things could never happen in England. An Irishman creates an accident and then somehow makes events from it. Patsy doesn’t do things of a set purpose, but he takes hold of opportunity, and he can make more of an accident than most people. But the thing that is bothering me is this. Though Patsy, by means of an eau de Cologne cork, has stopped me from being summarily expelled, all the Patsys and all the eau de Cologne corks in the world won’t stop uncle from leaving and taking you away with him. He’s going to-morrow by the 8.15 from Tullagh station.”
“How do you know?” asked Violet. “He has not said a word to me.”
“No, I don’t suppose he will till this evening; all the same, he is going. The last words he said in that fantastic interview with the old woman were, that he would leave the house to-day, only that he was too late to catch the 8.15, but that he’d go to-morrow; and he has given orders for the cart for the luggage, and the brougham to take you to the station.”
“This is dreadful,” said the girl. “Dicky, it was the day after to-morrow——”
“Yes; at two in the morning we were to start.”
They had wandered far by this. They had crossed the drive and entered the woods on the other side, walking in the direction of the Druids’ Altar. Breaking into a little glade they found themselves before the ruin of a tree, the bole of a great oak, broken off some ten feet from the ground; it was the same oak in which Mr Murphy had been hiding on the day we first made his acquaintance.