"She may be contrairy enough to give the General the gout in his big toe and the twisht in his timper, as often she's done. But she can't make our Miss Nelly marry where she don't like. If you'd put your romantic notions into your scrubbin' now, Miss Higgs; but I suppose it's your name is the matter with you, and you can't help it."
The under-housemaid, whose name happened to be Gladys Higgs, was reduced to tears by this remark, and the tears brought the kind-hearted Pat to repentance for his hastiness.
"Whatever the dickens came over me," he imparted to Bridget when they were having a snack of bread and cheese between meals in the room allotted to the cook, who was now also housekeeper, "to go sharpenin' my tongue on that foolish little girl? It isn't for you an' me to be makin' fun of their quare names. 'Tis no credit to us if we have elegant names in the counthry we come from."
"Aye, indeed. Where would you find pleasanter thin MacGeoghegan or McGroarty or Magillacuddy? There was a polisman in our town by the name of McGuffin. I always thought it real pleasant."
"Sure what would be on the little girl?—'tis Miss Nelly, I mean," said Pat, in a manner that showed his real anxiety. "She scared me, so she did, with her nonsense, that Gladys. For it stands to reason that Miss Nelly wouldn't mind marryin' Sir Robin—isn't he the fittest match for her?—if it wasn't that there might be someone else. And who could it be, I ask you, unbeknownst to us that has watched over her from a babby?"
"You're a foolish man to be takin' that much notice of that Gladys girl and her talk. Why shouldn't Miss Nelly have a headache? Why, I remember the Miss O'Flahertys, Lord Dunshanbo's daughters, when I was a little girl; and 'twas faintin' on the floor they were every other minute and everyone havin' to run and cut their stay-laces. They were fifty, too, if they were a day, so they ought to have had more sense. Why wouldn't Miss Nelly have Quality ways?"
"Young ladies aren't like that nowadays," Pat said dolefully. "'Tis the bicycle and the golf. They've no stay-laces to cut, so they don't go faintin' away. And Miss Nelly, poor lamb, she'd never be thinkin' of doing such a thing."
He went off sorrowfully, shaking his head. The mysteriousness of the change in Miss Nelly perturbed him the more. He looked away from the General when he gave the information about the headache.
"Miss Nelly said, sir," he volunteered, "that she was to be called, unless she was asleep, when you came home to dinner. Shall I send up Fanny to call her?"
"Not for worlds," said the General. "I'll go myself. She mustn't be disturbed, poor child, if she has a headache."