nous wolves,
merciless, rapacious, without hearts, full of greed, full of lust,
looking on female beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her
very life as a toy! Were she higher in the world there might be safety.
Were she lower there might be safety. But how could she send her girl
forth into the world without sending her certainly among the wolves? And
yet that piteous question was always sounding in her ears. "Mother, is
it always to be like this?"

Then Lieutenant Neville had appeared upon the scene, dressed in a
sailor's jacket and trowsers, with a sailor's cap upon his head, with
a loose handkerchief round his neck and his hair blowing to the wind.
In the eyes of Kate O'Hara he was an Apollo. In the eyes of any girl he
must have seemed to be as good-looking a fellow as ever tied a sailor's
knot. He had made acquaintance with Father Marty at Liscannor, and the
priest had dined with him at Ennis. There had been a return visit, and
the priest, perhaps innocently, had taken him up on the cliffs. There he
had met the two ladies, and our hero had been introduced to Kate O'Hara.

CHAPTER VI.

I'LL GO BAIL SHE LIKES IT.

It might be that the young man was a ravenous wolf, but his manners were
not wolfish. Had Mrs. O'Hara been a princess, supreme in her own rights,
young Neville could not have treated her or her daughter with more
respect. At first Kate had wondered at him, but had said but little. She
had listened to him, as he talked to her mother and the priest about the
cliffs and the birds and the seals he had shot, and she had felt that
it was this, something like this, that was needed to make life so sweet
that as yet there need be no longing, no thought, for eternity. It was
not that all at once she loved him, but she felt that he was a thing to
love. His very appearance on the cliff, and the power of thinking of him
when he was gone, for a while banished all tedium from her life. "Why
should you shoot the poor gulls?" That was the first question she asked
him; and she asked it hardly in tenderness to the birds, but because
with the unconscious cunning of her sex she understood that tenderness
in a woman is a charm in the eyes of a man.

"Only because it is so difficult to get at them," said Fred. "I believe
there is no other reason,--except that one must shoot something."

"But why must you?" asked Mrs. O'Hara.

"To justify one's guns. A man takes to shooting as a matter of course.
It's a k