“I should rather like to see Thracia,” remarked Caerleon, not very relevantly. “It must be a very interesting country.”
“Then why wouldn’t you and Lord Cyrul come with us?” asked the O’Malachy.
“Oh no, my friend,” cried his wife, “that would never do. Have you forgotten the unsettled state of Thracia? Do you not remember that the people hate travellers, throw all kinds of vexatious restrictions in their way, seize every opportunity of insulting and injuring them? Our dear marquis must not come. The country is positively dangerous.”
“Is that intended as a reason for our not visiting it?” asked Caerleon. “Cyril, I think we’ll make a tour in Thracia.”
“Oh, all right,” said Cyril. “I hope your will is made, though as I am to be with you, it won’t much matter.”
“But you cannot intend this in earnest?” asked Madame O’Malachy, with a most ingenuous air of simplicity. “I tell you that it is absolutely dangerous to go to Thracia.”
“You are going the wrong way to keep our friends back, Barbara,” said the O’Malachy. “Do you not know that to hear that a place is dangerous makes ut their juty to visut ut?”
“But these English are so strange!” cried his wife, with artless amazement. “They write letters to their ‘Times’ to complain if the slightest inconvenience touches them at a hotel, or if a street-boy calls them a bad name, and yet they go to look for danger when it is unnecessary.”
“One of the contradictions of human nature,” remarked the O’Malachy, grimly, but when he and his wife and daughter had reached their own room, he returned to the subject: “I don’t know what you were driving at just now, Barbara. Were you really trying to turn the young fellers back, or not? Caerleon is a decent boy enough. Was your heart suddenly filled with compassion for um, or were you trying to make terms with your conscience?”
“That is it,” returned Madame O’Malachy, with a side-glance at her daughter. “I do not wish to have it on my conscience that I brought these young men into Thracia. It is not my affair.”