e paused.

"Well, you haven't finished, y 'r anner," said Kernaghan.

"And in the north they think they are," continued the Young Doctor.
"I'd like to see those two as your eyes in front of your mind saw them,
Patsy."

"Aw, well then, you couldn't do it, Doctor dear, for you've niver been
in love. Shure, there's no heart till ye!" answered the Irishman, and
took another pinch of snuff with a flourish.

........................

Flamingo-like in her bright-coloured, figured gown, with a wild flower
in her hair and her gray curls dancing gently at her temples, a little
old lady trotted up and down the big sitting-room of Slow Down Ranch,
talking volubly and insistently. One ironically minded would have said
she chirruped, for her words came out in not unmusical, if staccato,
notes, and she shook her shrivelled, ringed fingers reprovingly at a
stalwart young man.

Once or twice, as she seemed to threaten him with what the poet called
"The slow, unmoving finger of scorn," he giggled. It was evident that he
was at once amused and troubled. This voice had cherished and chided him
all his life, and he could measure accurately what was behind it. It
was a wilful voice. It had the insistance which power gives, and to a
woman--or to most women--power is either money or beauty, since, in the
world as it is, office and authority are denied them. Beauty was gone
from the face of the ancient dame, but she still had much money, and,
on rare occasions, it gave her a little arrogance. It did so now as
she admonished her beloved son, who at any time would have renounced
fortune, or hope of fortune, for some wilful idea of his own. A less
sordid modern did not exist.

He was not very effective in the contest of tongue between his mother
and himself. As the talk went on he foresaw that he was to be beaten;
yet he persisted, for he loved a joy-wrangle, as he called it, with
his mother. He had argued with her many a time, just to see her in a
harmless passion, and note how the youth of her came back, giving high
colour to the wrinkled face, and how the eyes shone with a brightness
which had been constant in them long ago. They were now quarrelling over
that ever-fruitful cause of antagonism--the second woman in the life
of a man. Yet, strange to say, the flamingo-like Eugenie Guise, was
fighting for the second woman, not against her.

"I'll say it all again and again and again till you have sense,
Orlando," she declared. "Y