'Doreen, you must change your ways.'
The damsel's nostrils dilated a little; but, biting her lip, she answered nothing.
'You are twenty-two,' pursued her aunt. 'It is time that you gave up playing Miss Hoyden, and settled down into a respectable married woman.'
The girl walked on without a word, wondering what was coming next, while her aunt, growing exasperated at what she was pleased to consider stubbornness, bent down to sniff a rose which wept gems upon her dress.
'Does it trouble you,' she said, wiping the dew from her skirts carefully with a handkerchief, 'that Shane should stop out so late? The Glandores were always rakes, but were none the worse for that. For my part I hate a milksop.'
Poor lady! The late lord had given her little experience of the milksop!
'What can it signify to me what he does?' asked Doreen, with a tinge of bitterness. 'He is drinking to King William now, no doubt, if not insensible beneath the table.'
This was awkward, for my lady desired to make the best of Shane, and the fact of his doing homage to the Immortal memory was not likely to be pleasing to a Roman Catholic. So she turned her batteries.
'You are wild, and will come to shipwreck,' she declared, 'if we do not set some one to look after you. The way you behaved just now was most deplorable. Your poor father looked wretched; but the dear soul is a goose. Unless you mend your ways you will find no one to marry you at all, which will be dreadful, and a disgrace to all of us. Your behaviour to Terence is not quite seemly, for you forget that he is grown up, and that you should not trifle with an inflammable youth.'
This shot went home. Thoroughly taken aback, Doreen cried: