this, she glances whole volumes of encouragement at Desmond,
who, however, is so depressed by the fact that Monica has danced five
times with Ryde, and is now dancing with him again, that he gives her no
returning glance.

At this apparent coldness on his part, the blood of all the kings of
Munster awakes in Madam O'Connor's breast.

"'Pon my conscience," she says, "I wouldn't give a good farthing for the
lot of you, to let that girl go by! She came into Rossmoyne on the top
of a hay-cart, I hear,--more luck to her, say I; for it shows the pluck
in her, and the want of the sneaking fear of what he and she will say
(more especially _she_) that spoils half our women. When I was her age
I'd have done it myself. Rossmoyne, get out of that, till I get another
look at her. I like her face. It does me good. It is so full of life _et
le beaute du diable_," says Madame O'Connor, who speaks French like a
native, and, be it understood, Irish too.

"_We_ like to look at her, too," says Owen Kelly.

"To look, indeed! That would be thought poor comfort in my days when a
pretty woman was in question, and men were men!" says Madam, with
considerable spirit. "If I were a young fellow, now, 'tis in the
twinkling of an eye I'd have her from under her aunt's nose and away in
a coach and four."

"The sole thing that prevents our _all_ eloping with Miss Beresford on
the spot is--is--the difficulty of finding the coach and four and the
blacksmith," says Mr. Kelly, with even a denser gloom upon his face than
usual. Indeed, he now appears almost on the verge of tears.

"We never lost time speculating on ways and means in _those_ days," says
Madame O'Connor, throwing up her head. "Whoo! Times are changed indeed
since my grandfather played old Harry with the countrymen and my
grandmother's father by running away with her without a word to any one,
after a big ball at my great grandmother's, and that, too, when she was
guarded as if she was the princess royal herself and had every man in
the South on his knees to her."

"But how did he manage it?" says Desmond, laughing.

"Faith, by making the old gentleman my great-grandfather as drunk as a
fiddler, on drugged potheen," says Madam O'Connor, proudly. "The butler
and he did it between them; but it was as near being murder as anything
you like, because they put so much of the narcotic into the whiskey that
the old man didn't come to himself for three days. That's the sort of
thing for _me_,