“That was just an act of friendship,” protested Billie.
“There are not many acts of real friendship,” said Maria, “and not many young girls who would have endured what the Motor Maids endured for my sake. Lord Glenarm has heard the whole story and I can assure you he is as proud to know you as I am.”
There is no getting around a good, substantial, sincere compliment, and the four young girls could not conceal the pride they felt in Maria’s praises.
“They are four sweet lassies, as David Ramsay remarked,” observed Miss Campbell, and everybody smiled; for Miss Campbell often quoted David Ramsay lately and had received two long letters from him since she had been in the land of the Shamrock.
As they neared the top of the hill, the landscape unfolded before them in a splendid panorama,—fields and meadows; dark splashes of green marking forests of oak and beech trees, and here and there a thin haze of smoke curling up from the chimney of a farm house. Toward the west was the soft blue expanse of the sea.
“They do say that the good Saint Patrick preached the gospel once on this hillside and converted a king and hundreds of his people to Christianity,” Maria was saying, when they heard a voice calling excitedly:
“Billie, Elinor, Nancy, Mary!” and Beatrice Colchester dashed up. She was riding a fat gray pony which was puffing indignantly like an apoplectic old gentleman who had been made to climb a steep hill against his will.
Behind her rode Lord Glenarm on a hunting-horse, and barking and yelping at his heels were half a dozen dogs.
It was all very jolly and natural,—no pomp and ceremony about visiting a real lord who was as simple and unaffected as Billie’s own father. At last they drew up at the gate of the Abbey, and for once in his useful life the “Comet” seemed decidedly out of place and inappropriate.
The left wing of Castle Abbey was a picturesque pile of crumbling ruins overhung with ivy and climbing rose bushes. Here had been the chapel of the monks and the cloistered walk wherein they had paced up and down telling their beads. In this quadrangle, also, had been the original garden of the monastery and a garden it still was, carefully tended by an aged Irish gardener and his assistants, and filled with bright masses of old-fashioned flowers. The other wing of the Abbey, where had once been many of the cells and the monks’ refectory or dining-hall, was now the dwelling place of Lord Glenarm for at least six weeks in the year.