“How does it come that you have no brogue?” he abruptly asked.
“Oh! dear, yes I have. I would shame the bogs of Ballynashaughnagaun if I did not fairly represent them in the land of the Saxon.”
“Do pronounce that jaw-breaker again.”
“Ballynashaughnagaun.”
“How dreadful!”
“We have longer names than that.” And Miss Devereux, to Percival’s intense amusement, proceeded to run over the townlands surrounding her wild Connemara home.
“Only fancy if a man got lost in Knocka-what-you-may-call-um; why, he’d perish by the wayside ere he could ask his way to the place from whence he came.”
“I am quite prepared to think that you would,” she laughed.
“I’m rather a dab at languages,” he said, with a certain tinge of self-satisfaction in his tone.
“I beg your pardon—a what?”