ou see I've only just come home. I've been at school in Paris for
the last two years--"

A memory of a ferocious denunciation of the Gaelic League by her
father came to her; she wondered what Barty would do if she offered
him one of the profane imitations of the Major that had earned for her
the laurels of the schoolroom.

"Oh, I'm quite sure I mightn't become a Gaelic Leaguer!" she repeated,
beginning to laugh, while samples of her father's rhetoric welled up
in her mind.

Barty thought he had never seen anything so enchanting as her face, as
she looked at him, laughing, with wavering lights, filtered through
young beech leaves, in her eyes. He felt a delirious desire to show
her that he was not a tongue-tied fool; that he also, like Larry, was
a man of ideas.

"I wish to God!" he said, with the disordered violence of a shy man,
"that there was anny league or society in Ireland that would override
class prejudice, and oblitherate religious bigotry!"

He had snatched a paragraph from his last address to the Gaelic
Leaguers of Cluhir, and with it was betrayed into the pronunciation
that mastered him in moments of excitement.

Christian said to herself that she thanked heaven Judith wasn't there
to make her laugh.

"I don't _think_ I'm a religious bigot," she said, with a faint
tremor in her voice, "but one never knows!" Her head was bent down,
the brim of her large hat hid her face.

Barty was stricken. What devil had possessed him? She was hurt! She
was a Protestant, and in his cursed folly he had made her think he was
reproaching her for Bigotry. Good God! What could he do?

Two emotions, hung, as it were, on hair-triggers, held the stage. In
Christian, the fiend of laughter held sway, in poor Barty, the angel
of tears. It was perhaps well for them both that their next step in
advance took them round a bend in the path, and brought them face to
face with the picnic.

CHAPTER XVIII

Young Mr. Coppinger had been well inspired in his selection of a site
for the entertainment. The trees along the river's bank had ceased for
a space, leaving a level ring of grass, whereon certain limestone
boulders had scattered themselves, with the deliberate intention, as
it would seem, of providing seats for picnickers. Across that fairy
circle of greenness a small vassal-stream bore its tribute waters to
the Ownashee, with as much dignity as it had been able to assume in
the forty level yards that lay between its