"Excellent!" he cried—"an excellent idea, Miss Clodagh! Here's your difficulty solved, Denis. Your Irish sense of chivalry won't allow you to deprive me of so charming a guide."
Clodagh laughed frankly at the stilted compliment, and Asshlin's face brightened perceptibly.
"Oh, well, as you're so amiable," he said magnanimously. "I don't mind admitting that 'twould have been a bit of a sacrifice to give up the hunt. Though if I hadn't been overruled by the majority, I'd have swallowed the ruins without a grimace."
He laughed with restored good-humour, and turned to his daughters.
"When you've done breakfast, Clo," he said, "run round to the stables and tell Burke he need only saddle the bay."
With the decision that he was, after all, to enjoy his day's sport, his spirits had risen; and despite the fact that the daylight revealed many evidences of last night's dissipation that would have been invisible thirty years ago, Milbanke was pleased and reassured by his appearance. His movements were energetic, his expression alert. He suggested one who is interested and attracted by life; and the elder man was too unimaginative—too single of purpose in his own concerns—to suspect that the energy, the suggestion of anticipation were due to his own presence in the house, to the promise of excitement and diversion that that presence offered.
With the definite arrangement of the day's plans, a fresh energy had descended on the party, and but a few minutes passed before Clodagh and Nance rose from table and left the room. Then, as the two men were left alone, Milbanke put into action the resolution that had been gradually maturing in his mind.
Not without a certain trepidation—not without an embarrassed distaste for the task—he bent forward in his precise manner, and drawing the cheque from beneath his plate, began to smooth it out.
"Denis," he said, "I found this on my plate when I came downstairs——"
Asshlin looked up hastily and laughed. He had all the Irishman's distaste to money as a topic of conversation. He was as sensitive in the offering of it to another, as in the accepting of it for himself.