"Do not!" exclaimed Barty; "don't think at all! Don't be wasting time
like that! No man ever had a greater chance than this! Lep at it,
Larry, old lad! Give me the word I want, and I'll wire the Doctor
to-night--a message he'll understand, and no one else. Oh Larry!" he
implored, "don't cry off now! You've pots of money; you can do any
damn thing you like! If you refuse this chance now you'll only regret
it the once, and that'll be all your life!"

Then did that mysterious and mighty agency, the warp that a mind has
received in childhood, come to reinforce the enthusiasms and ambitions
of youth, and urge Larry to assent. That other and nobler Spirit of
the Nation woke, and the passionate, irreconcilable voice, that had
first spoken to him when he was a little boy, woke and uttered itself
again, shouting to him its wild summons at a moment when the tide of
life was running fiercest in him, when every emotion was at highest
pressure and calling for great adventure.

"All right, Barty, my son, I'm for it!" said Larry, with the
assumption of outward calm, when heart and pulses are pounding, that
has been claimed as one of the assets of a public school education,
and is, even without that advantage, the birthright of such as young
Mr. Coppinger.

CHAPTER XXX

Larry bicycled up to the white chapel on the hill, to Second Mass, on
the following morning. He rode fast through the converging groups of
people, on foot, on outside cars, in carts, on horseback. It was four
years since he had last attended a service there, and to many of the
assembled congregation he had become a stranger. None the less there
was no hesitation in any man's mind in identifying him; these were
people who knew a gentleman when they saw one, and the young owner of
Coppinger's Court was the only gentleman ever to be seen at the white
chapel on the hill.

Therefore it was that Larry's right hand was seldom on his handle-bar,
as he skimmed through the people, decent and dark-dressed in their
Sunday best, who saluted with a long-established friendship and
respect this solitary representative of their traditional enemies, the
landlords.

There cannot be in the world a people more unfailingly church-going
than those sons and daughters of Rome who are bred in Southern
Ireland. Larry looked down, from his pew in the gallery, at the close
ranks of kneeling figures, and thought with compunction how long it
was since he had been in a church, and tha