"I thought it was her colour which the sun spoilt, Kate?"
Kate laughed, and with a squeeze of her father's arm and a saucy nod, flitted off to see to some member of her animal kingdom.
Luckily for the Irish, they take trouble well, and though skinning is an unpleasant process, they soon get used to it.
Three months after the events recorded in the preceding paragraphs, Kate and her father were living at what had been their agent's cottage, a tiny house with stabling for one horse. The Lowry's agent was now Colonel Lowry himself, and his daughter (the best and straightest lady rider in Gonaway) had laid aside her habit as a souvenir of happier days.
At the Hall a rich Londoner had replaced the old squire (as his tenant), and a London young lady inflicted agony on the mouths of such horses as she rode, and never disgraced her sex by an after-breakfast visit to the stables.
Instead of the laughter of that tom-boy Kate, highly finished performances on the piano frightened the blackbirds off the lawn, and instead of jokes and half-crowns from a poor but warm-hearted native, the peasantry now received pamphlets on market gardening and threepenny pieces from an alien millionaire.
"Molly says they have just shot 'the Laurels' for the seventh time this year, and there's not a hen pheasant left on the estate."
"Never mind, father, it won't matter to us. Mr Preece will have some more down from Leadenhall Market or some such place next year; and, after all, they pay our rent for us, and we couldn't live without them."