hey came to her through the blood of some Irishwoman whom a
dead Hewish had married perhaps a hundred years before.

While Biddy Joyce instructed her in oaths and legend, and her father
taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot and to fish, her moral and
literal education were entrusted to Mr. Considine. Physically Mr.
Considine was of a type that does not change much with the passage of
time. When first he came to Roscarna, a couple of years before
Gabrielle was born, he was a young man of twenty. How he came to be
chosen for the cure of Clonderriff I do not know, unless he were in
some way connected with the Parker family. He was a Wiltshireman,
tall, sandy-haired, with a long face and a square jaw to which he gave
an air of determination by constantly gritting his teeth. Gabrielle,
as imitative as a starling, began to mimic this habit of his until one
day he found himself staring at her, as at a mirror, and told her to
stop. She had meant no harm; she didn't even know that she was doing
it, but he treated the offence quite seriously.

It was his nature to treat everything seriously, including his mission
among the heathen or, what was worse, the Catholic Joyces. He taught
her the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer, and the collect for the week,
and simple fractions and the capes and headlands of England (the capes
and headlands of Ireland didn't matter) and the verb "to have" in
French, together with long lists of the kings of Israel and Judah.
Gabrielle was very quick to learn. From the first her memory was a
pleasant surprise to her--sometimes a surprise to Mr. Considine, as
when she offered to give him the Kings of Judah backwards, a proceeding
that struck him as not only revolutionary but irreverent, and tinged
with a flavour of the Black Mass.

Gabrielle always knew when she had annoyed or embarrassed him, not
because he reproved her in any way--to have shown heat in words would
have been against his principles--but because he did show heat in his
neck, where a faint flush would spread upwards to his ears above the
band of his clerical collar. When she was thoroughly bored Gabrielle
would sometimes try this experiment, just in the same way as she made
the snapdragons put out their tongues.

Jocelyn liked Considine and trusted him, partly, no doubt, because he
happened to be an Englishman--the only one in this wilderness of
Joyces--and partly because he was something of a sportsman: a little
too serious and