ly and presses an impassioned kiss on each little
pink-tinged palm. With a courteous reverence for her evident shyness, he
then releases her, and, raising his hat, stands motionless until she has
sprung down the bank and so reached the Moyne fields again.

Then she turns and waves him a second and last good night. Returning the
salute, he replaces his hat on his head, and thrusting his hands deep in
his pockets, turns towards Coole--and dinner. He is somewhat late for
the latter, but this troubles him little, so set is his mind upon the
girl who has just left him.

Surely she is hard to win, and therefore--_how_ desirable! "The women of
Ireland," says an ancient chronicler, "are the coyest, the most
coquettish, yet withal the coldest and virtuousest women upon earth."
Yet, allowing all this, given time and opportunity, they may be safely
wooed. What Mr. Desmond complains of bitterly, in his homeward musings
to-night, is the fact that to him neither time nor opportunity is
afforded.

"She is a woman therefore to be won;" but how is his courtship to be
sped, if thorns are to beset his path on every side, and if persistent
malice blocks his way to the feet of her whom he adores?

He reaches home in an unenviable frame of mind, and is thoroughly
unsociable to Owen Kelly and the old squire all the evening.

Next morning sees him in the same mood; and, indeed, it is about this
time he takes to imagining his little love as being a hapless prisoner
in the hands of two cruel ogres (I am afraid he really does apply the
term "ogres" to the two old ladies of Moyne), and finds a special
melancholy pleasure in depicting her as a lonely captive condemned to
solitary confinement and dieted upon bread and water.

To regard the Misses Blake in the light either of ogres or witches
required some talent; but Mr. Desmond, at this period of his
love-affair, managed it.

He would go about, too, singing,--

"Oh, who will o'er the downs so free,"

taking immense comfort out of, and repeating over and over again, such
lines as--

"I sought her bower at break of day,
'Twas guarded safe and sure;"

"Her father he has locked the door,
Her mother keeps the key;
But neither bolt nor bar shall keep
My own true love from me,"--

until bars, and bolts, and locks, and keys seemed all real.

CHAPTER XVIII.

How, after much discussion, the devoted, if mistaken, adherents of
Thalia gain the da