"But it'll not be Giralda!" Flavia wailed.
"Sure it's the black shame, it is!" Uncle Ulick cried, his face dark. "It's enough to raise the country! Ay, I say it, though you're listening, Asgill. It's more than blood can stand!"
"No one is more sorry than myself," Asgill replied, with a look of concern. "I don't make the laws, or they'd be other than they are!"
"True for you," Uncle Ulick answered. "I'm allowing that. And it is true, too, that to make a stir too early would ruin all. I'm afraid you must be making the best of it, Flavvy! I'd go after them myself, but the time's not convenient, as you know, and by this they're in Tralee, bad cess to it, where there's naught to be done. They'll be for selling her to one of the garrison officers, I'm thinking; and may the little gentleman in black velvet break his neck for him! Or they'll take her farther up country, maybe to Dublin."
Flavia's last hopes died with this verdict. She could not control her tears, and she turned and went away in grief to the house.
Meantime the hangers-on and the beggars pressed upon the gentry, anxious to hear. The McMurrough, not sorry to find some one on whom to vent his temper, turned upon them and drove them away with blows of his whip. The movement brought him face to face with Captain Augustin. The fiery little Frenchman disdained to give way, in a trice angry words passed, and—partly out of mischief, for the moment was certainly not propitious—Asgill repeated the proposal which Colonel John had just made. The Colonel had stood in the background during the debate about the mare, but thus challenged he stood forward.
"It's a fair compromise," he argued. "And if Captain Augustin is prepared to pay twenty per cent——."
"He'll not have his cargo, nor yet a cask!" The McMurrough replied with a curt, angry laugh. "Loss and enough we've had to-day."
"But——"
"Get me back the mare," the young man cried, cutting the Colonel short with savage ridicule. "Get me back the mare, and I'll talk. That's all I have to say."