his is a delicate compliment to you, Owen, so
listen to it) might have been worse. Do you know I have sometimes
thought----"

"She has really!" interrupts Mr. Kelly, turning with cheerful
encouragement to the others. "You wouldn't think it to look at her,
would you? but I know her intimately, and can vouch for the truth of her
words. Go on, my dear Olga."

But "my dear Olga" has turned aside, and declines to take any notice of
his remark beyond a faint grimace.

"She's very shy," says Mr. Kelly, in an explanatory aside, "and _so_
retiring. Can't bear to hear herself publicly praised, or feel herself
the centre of attraction. Let us haste to change the subject." This with
many becks, and nods, and wreathed smiles, meant to explain the delicacy
of the feeling that prompts him to this course. "By the by, Desmond,
doesn't this fairy-like spot, and the moonlight, and the pathos of the
silent night, and everything, remind you forcibly of old O'Connor?"

"But I always heard----" begins Monica, in a voice of much amazement;
then she stops confusedly and presently goes on again, but in a
different key. "Was The O'Connor, then, aesthetic?" she says.

At this even Lord Rossmoyne, who was in the lowest depths of despair,
gives way to open mirth.

"Well, no, not exactly," says Ulic Ronayne. "There was a fatal
healthiness about his appearance that disagreed with that idea. But he
certainly was fond of this little place; he put up the fountain himself,
had it brought all the way from Florence for the purpose; and he had a
trick of lying here on his face and hands for hours together, grubbing
for worms,--or studying the insect world I think he used to call it."

"I have always thought," says Mr. Kelly, in a tone of reflective
sadness, "what an uncomfortable position that must be."

"What must be?"

"Lying on one's face and hands. What becomes of the rest of one? Does
one keep one's heels in the air whilst doing it? To me it sounds awful!
Yet only last week I read in the papers of a fellow who was found on a
road on his face and hands, and the doctors said he must have been in
that position _for hours!_ Fancy--_your_ nose, for instance, Rossmoyne,
in the mud, and your heels in the air, _for hours_!"

Lord Rossmoyne, having vainly tried to imagine his dignified body in
such a position, looks distinctly offended.

"No, _nobody_ would like it," says Kelly, pathetically, answering his
disgusted look exactly as if it had been pu