people who make
a great clatter about liberty and equality and the rights of man. And
you know Aunt Estelle belonged to the old aristocracy in France. They
wanted to guillotine her in the Terror. I don't think she will love
Republicans."

"I suppose not," said Neal, gravely.

"But that won't prevent our being friends, Neal?"

"Una, my father is always talking about the struggle that's coming in
Ireland. I don't know much about politics. I think I hate the whole
thing. But if there is trouble I suppose that I shall be on one side and
you on the other."

"Don't look so sad, Neal."

Then, as his spirits grew depressed, her's seemed to rise buoyantly. She
raised her voice so that she could be heard in the bow of the boat.

"Mr. Donald Ward! Mr. Donald Ward! Your nephew, Neal, is telling me that
when we have a reign of terror in Ireland you will make him cut off my
head. Please promise me you won't."

Donald rested on his oar and gazed at the girl as she sat smiling at him
in the stern of the boat.

"Young lady," he said, "don't trouble yourself. We didn't hurt woman or
girl in America. No woman shall die a violent death in Ireland at the
hands of the people."

"And no man, either?" cried Una. "Say it again, Mr. Donald Ward. Say
'And no man, either.' Can't we settle everything without killing men?"

"Men are different," said Donald. "It's right for men to die fighting,
or die on the scaffold if need be."

A silence followed Donald Ward's words. In 1798 talk of death in battle
or death on a scaffold moved even the youngest and most careless to
serious thought. The world was full then of the kind of ideas for which
men are well content to die, for the sake of which also they did not
hesitate to shed blood. The Americans had set mankind a headline to copy
in their Declaration of Independence. The French wrote Liberty with huge
red flourishes which set the heart of Europe beating high. Italians
were proclaiming a foreign army the liberators of their country, while
Jacobins growled fiercely against the Pope. Kosciusko, in Poland,
organised a futile revolution, and fell in the cause of national
freedom. Even phlegmatic Englishmen caught the spirit of the times,
hated intensely or worshipped enthusiastically that liberty which some
saw as an imperial goddess for the sake of whose bare limbs and pale,
noble face death might be gladly met; while others beheld in her
a blood-spattered strumpet whirling in abandoned dance