"My dear, or no, you'll be doing well to be careful!" The McMurrough said, in a jeering tone, with his eye on the Colonel.
"Pho!" the man replied. "And I that have heard the young mistress sing it a score of times!"
"Ay, but not in this company!" The McMurrough rejoined.
Colonel John looked round the table. "If you mean," he said quietly, "that I am a loyal subject of King George, I am that. But what is said at my host's table, no matter who he is, is safe for me. Moreover, I've lived long enough to know, gentlemen, that most said is least meant, and that the theme of a lady's song is more often—sunset than sunrise!" And he bowed in the direction of the girl.
The McMurrough's lip curled. "Fair words," he sneered. "And easy to speak them, when you and your d—d Protestant Whigs are on top!"
"We won't talk of Protestants, d—d or otherwise!" Colonel John replied. And for the first time his glance, keen as the flicker of steel, crossed The McMurrough's. The younger man's eyes fell. A flush of something that might have been shame tinged his brow: and though no one at table save Uncle Ulick understood the allusion, his conscience silenced him. "I hope," the Colonel continued more soberly, "that a good Protestant may still be a good Irishman."
"It's not I that have seen one, then!" The McMurrough muttered churlishly.
"Just as a bad Protestant makes a bad Irishman," the Colonel returned, with another of those glances which seemed to prove that the old man was not quite put off.
The McMurrough was silenced. But the cudgels were taken up in an unexpected quarter. "I know nothing of bad or good," Flavia said, in a voice vibrating with eagerness, "but only, to our sorrow, of those who through centuries have robbed us! Who, not content, shame on them! with shutting us up in a corner of the land that was ours from sea to sea, deny us even here the protection of their law! Law? Can you call it law——"
"Heaven be between us and it!" old Darby groaned.