im well, and too well!" she snapped at
him, looking up his long length to his handsome, good natured face,
much as a minute female cur-dog might look and snap, presuming on her
sex, at a Great Dane. "It's the new little docthor, Danny Aherne, that
your Honour is afther putting in the Dispinsary!"

"Oh, that poor little fellow?" said Dick, laughing, but with a touch
of discomposure; "_I_ didn't put him there. What's the matter
with him, any how? Why, he hasn't been at the job three months! Give
the man time, Mary, give him time! I'll engage you'll all be in love
with him by this time next year!"

Mrs. Twomey glanced at Miss Coppinger, and replied with decorous
piety:

"God grant it!"

She then, with an admirable assumption of respect for her superiors,
and zeal for her office, moved past her visitors into the dairy.

Dick Talbot-Lowry hesitated a moment or two, then he laughed again,
and strode after her into the dark dairy; Miss Coppinger followed him.
Mrs. Twomey, a tiny and almost imperceptible bundle, was already on
her knees in a corner, scrubbing a glistening metal churn, and so
engrossed in her task as to be unaware of her visitors.

"Look here, Mary," began the Major, with a touch of severity; "what's
all this about Doctor Aherne?"

Mrs. Twomey rose from her knees, dried her little scarlet claws in her
apron, and stood to attention. Having opened the debate by calling
fervently upon her God to witness that she knew nothing of the matter,
she proceeded, like a solo pianist, to run her fingers, as it were,
lightly over the keys. Passing swiftly from her own birth, upbringing,
invincible respectability, and remoteness from all neighbours, or
knowledge of neighbours, she coruscated in a cadenza in which the
families of Talbot-Lowry and Coppinger, and her devotion to both, were
dazzlingly blended, and finished in a grand chord on the apparently
irrelevant fact that she would die dead before she would put down any
dirty stain before the Major's honour.

"But Mary," interposed Frederica, with an inartistic directness that
was in painful contrast to the cadenza, "what has the Major got to say
to Doctor Aherne?"

The question was ignored; the artist dashed on into a presto movement,
in which, as far as any direct theme was discernible, Dr. Mangan, his
cupidity, his riches, the riches of Dr. Aherne's parents were the
leading motives. Also, parenthetically, that Danny Aherne was without
shoe or stocking to his f