“How do you know my name?” she quickly demanded.
“I asked the waiter after you had left.”
“Now for an exchange,” she laughed. “Let us trade. What is your name?”
“Philip Redmond, son of Redmond of Ballymacreedy.”
“Why, that is Ballymacreedy,” exclaimed the young girl, pointing to a fir-covered mountain, upon the side of which, as though perched on a shelf, stood a gaunt, uncompromising-looking, square-built mansion, all roof and windows.
Phil Redmond’s feelings, as he gazed on the home which he had never known save by hearsay, were of a very varied and conflicting nature. He had pictured it a feudal stronghold towering over an extensive lake such as America boasts of—a diminutive ocean—a battlemented castle, with keep and moat and drawbridge, ivy-grown in the interests of the picturesque, and plate-glassed in the interests of modern sunlight.
“Good heaven!” he exclaimed involuntarily, “how unlike what I conceived it to be. What a cruel disappointment!”
So rudely were his ideas shattered, and so bitterly the pride of baronial halls mortified, that the poor fellow’s heart felt quite crushed. Whether Miss O’Byrne saw this or whether Doaty saw it is not the question here; but certes, that admirable little brute gave a loud neigh as a trumpet-call to Redmond’s scattered senses, and evinced for the first moment during the preceding half-hour a desire to proceed upon his homeward journey.
“Papa does not visit, Mr. Redmond,” said Miss O’Byrne as she grasped the reins upon resuming her seat in the basket upon wheels, “but I shall ask him to call upon you, when I may hope for something like a formal introduction. How half an hour flies upon the wings of sans cérémonie!” And with a delicious inclination of the head, half-saucy, half-dignified, and wholly piquante, she disappeared at a turn of the road leading into the valley.
“Heigh-ho!” sighed Philip Redmond of Ballymacreedy.