Byrne had left a lamp lighted in the hall and the guest’s candlestick waiting for him on the table. The lamp was sufficient to show him the executive side of the big front door that had been nearly battered in in the time of the Fenians and still possessed the ponderous locks and bars of a past day when the tenants of Kilgobbin had fought the pikemen of Arranakilty and Rupert Berknowles had hung seventeen rebels, no less, on the branches of the big oak “be the gates.”
Pinckney undid bolt and bar, turned the key in the great lock and flung the door open, disclosing Phyl standing in the moonlight. The contrast between the forbidding and ponderous door and the charming little figure against which it had stood as a barrier might have struck him had his mind been less astonished. As it was he could think of nothing but the strangeness of the business in hand.
“Where on earth have you been?” said he.
“Out in the woods,” said Phyl, entering quite unconcerned and removing her cloak. “A fox got trapped in the woods and I went to let it out and couldn’t find it, then that old fool Byrne locked the door; lucky you were up. I saw the light in the library shining through a crack in the shutters and knocked.”
Pinckney was putting up the bar and sliding the bolts. He said nothing. Had Phyl been another girl, he might have laughed and joked over the matter, but care of Phyl’s well-being was now part of his business in life and that consideration just checked his speech. There was nothing at all wrong in the affair, and never for a moment did he dream of making the slightest remonstrance; still, the unwisdom of a young girl wandering about in the woods at night after trapped foxes was a patent fact which disturbed the mind of this guardian unto dumbness.
Phyl, who was as sensitive to impressions as a radiometer to light, noted the silence of the other and resented it as she hung up her old hat and cloak. She knew nothing of the true facts of the case, she looked on Pinckney as a being almost of her own age, and that he should dare to express disapproval of an act of hers not concerning him, even by silence, was an intolerable insult. She knew that she loathed him now.—Prig!
This was the first real meeting of these two and Fate, with the help of Irish temper and the Pinckney conscience, was making a fine fiasco of it.
Phyl, having hung up the hat and coat, turned without a word, marched into the library and finding the book she had been reading that day, put it under her arm.
“Good night,” said she as she passed him in the hall.