As she looked at Milbanke's perplexed, concerned face, her expression changed, and she smiled. The smile was gracious and reassuring, but below the graciousness lay a tinge of tolerant indulgence.
"We won't talk about it any more," she said. "I don't suppose you can be expected to understand." And suddenly raising her head, she whistled to the dogs.
During the remainder of the walk Milbanke was very silent. Perplexed and yet fascinated by the problem, his mind dwelt unceasingly upon this strange position into which the chances of a day or two had thrown him. The bonds that drew him to his entertainers, and the gulf that separated him from them, were so tangible and yet so illusive. In every outward respect they were his fellow beings; they spoke the same language, wore the same dress, ate the same food, and yet unquestionably they were creatures of different fibre. He felt curiously daunted and curiously attracted by the peculiar fact.
To appreciate the difference between the Englishman and the Irishman one must see the latter in his native atmosphere. It is there that his faults and his virtues take on their proper values; there that his innate poetry, his reckless generosity, his prodigal hospitality have fullest scope; there that his primitive narrowness of outlook, his antiquated sense of honour and his absurdly sensitive self-esteem are most vividly backgrounded. Outside his own country, he is merely a subject of a great Empire, possessing, perhaps, a sharper wit and a more ingratiating manner than his fellow-subjects of colder temperament; but in his natural environment he stands out pre-eminently as a peculiar development—the product of a warm-blooded, intelligent, imaginative race that by some oversight of Nature has been pushed aside in the march of the nations.
Milbanke made no attempt to formulate this idea or any portion of it, as he paced steadily forward across the darkening sands; but incontinently it did flash across his mind that the girl beside him claimed more attention in this unsophisticated atmosphere than he might have given her in conventional surroundings. She was so much part of the picture—so undeniably a child of the sweeping cliffs, the magnificent sea, and the hundred traditions that encircled the primitive land. In her buoyant, youthful figure he seemed, by a curious retrograde process of the mind, to find the solution to his own early worship of Asshlin. Asshlin had attracted him, ruled him, domineered over him by right of superiority—the hereditary, half-barbaric superiority of the natural aristocrat; the man of ancient lineage in a country where yesterday—and the glories of yesterday—stand for everything, where to-day is unreckoned with, and to-morrow does not exist. Reaching the end of the strand, he turned to her quickly with a strange sensation of sympathy—almost of apprehension.
"Miss Clodagh," he said gently, as she began to ascend the heaped-up boulders that separated the road from the beach, "Miss Clodagh, I grant that I don't quite understand, as you put it; but I knew your father many years before you were born, and I think that gives me some privilege. On one point I have quite made up my mind. I shall not play cards again while I am in your house."
As he spoke, Clodagh paused in her ascent of the boulders and looked at him. In the softly deepening twilight her eyes again held the mysterious promise of great beauty; and in their depths a shade of respect, of surprised admiration had suddenly become visible. As she gazed at him, her lips parted involuntarily.
"I didn't think you were so plucky," she said; then abruptly she stopped, glancing over her shoulder.
From the road behind them came the clicking thud of a horse's hoofs, and a moment later the voice of Asshlin hailed them out of the dusk.
CHAPTER VIII