after Kathleen.'

'Reassuring! Only mind you put a chapter about it into the tour.' Under
the cover of these words he was gone.

'I declare there's some mystery about his companion!' exclaimed Horatia.
'Suppose it were Calthorp himself?'

'Owen is not so lost to respect for his sister.'

'But did you not see how little he was surprised, and how much
preoccupied?'

'Very likely; but no one but you could imagine him capable of such an
outrage.'

'You have been crazy ever since you entered Ireland, and expect every one
else to be the same. Seriously, what damage did you anticipate from a
little civility?'

'If you begin upon that, I shall go out and finish my sketch, and not
unpack one of the boxes.'

Nevertheless, Lucilla spent much fretting guesswork on her cousin's
surmise. She relied too much on Owen's sense of propriety to entertain
the idea that he could be forwarding a pursuit so obviously insolent, but
a still wilder conjecture had been set afloat in her mind. Could the
nameless one be Robert Fulmort? Though aware of the anonymous nature of
brother's friends, the secrecy struck her as unusually guarded; and to
one so used to devotion, it seemed no extraordinary homage that another
admirer should be drawn along at a respectful distance, a satellite to
her erratic course; nay, probably all had been concerted in
Woolstone-lane, and therewith the naughty girl crested her head, and
prepared to take offence. After all, it could not be, or why should Owen
have been bent on returning, and be so independent of her? Far more
probably he had met a college friend or a Westminster schoolfellow, some
of whom were in regiments quartered in Ireland, and on the morrow would
bring him to do the lions of Glendalough, among which might be reckoned
the Angel Anglers!

That possibility might have added some grains to the satisfaction of
making a respectable toilette next day. Certain it is that Miss
Sandbrook's mountain costume was an exquisite feat of elaborate
simplicity, and that the completion of her sketch was interrupted by many
a backward look down the pass, and many a contradictory mood, sometimes
boding almost as harsh a reception for Robert as for Mr. Calthorp,
sometimes relenting in the thrill of hope, sometimes accusing herself of
arrant folly, and expecting as a _pis aller_ the diversion of dazzling
and tormenting an Oxonian, or a soldier or two! Be the meeting what it
might, she preferred that it shou