"That's nothing," retorted May Girmory, "for where I was on the Beltane eve, there in that very place ye were yourself—you and my brither Jo. It is like that ye would keep that secret? But this is different."
"I will keep it, 'by the hand and fut of Mary,'" said Lizzie McCreath, quite forgetting that she was the daughter of the Grand Master of an Orange Lodge.
"Well, then," said May, "there is a Princess riding about the country, here and there and away. She has all Stair Garland's band ready, and hundreds more, too—aye, thousands if need be, pledged to rescue the lads laid up there. Jo is in it."
"Oh," said Liz McCreath, with a curious alteration of tone, "Jo is in it, is he? And he never said a word to me."
"Neither did he to me, but somebody else telled me—"
"Sandy O'Neil, it would be, maybe then, like as not!"
"And what for no?" demanded the revealer of secrets, and so proceeded unblushingly with her tale. She skipped some parts, to which she had been sworn to particular secrecy. But Miss Liz McCreath, while noting these, let the blanks pass, comfortably sure in her mind that so soon as she got Jo Girmory by himself, she knew a way of making him tell her all about it—the same, indeed, as that by which May Girmory had brought Sandy O'Neil to full auricular confession.
"But what like is your Princess? Does she wear a goold crown now?" said the Irish girl.
"Not her," said May Girmory, "she has a riding skirt, the way folk has them made in London, and gangs by at a hand-gallop, a different powny every time, and Lord, she doesna spare them!"
"That," said Liz McCreath with cold contempt, "is no Princess at all. 'Tis only little Patsy Ferris from Cairn Ferris, and I saw her faither yesterday at the Apothecaries' Hall at the Vennel Head!"