he evening is over. He was walking
with you all yesterday and the day before."

"Why shouldn't he,--and we that have known each other all our lives?
But, Barbara, pray, pray never say a word of this to any one!"

"Is it I? Wouldn't I cut out my tongue first?"

"I don't know why I let you talk to me in this way. There has never
been anything between me and Phineas,--your brother I mean."

"I know whom you mean very well."

"And I feel quite sure that there never will be. Why should there?
He'll go out among great people and be a great man; and I've already
found out that there's a certain Lady Laura Standish whom he admires
very much."

"Lady Laura Fiddlestick!"

"A man in Parliament, you know, may look up to anybody," said Miss
Mary Flood Jones.

"I want Phin to look up to you, my dear."

"That wouldn't be looking up. Placed as he is now, that would be
looking down; and he is so proud that he'll never do that. But come
down, dear, else they'll wonder where we are."

Mary Flood Jones was a little girl about twenty years of age, with
the softest hair in the world, of a colour varying between brown and
auburn,--for sometimes you would swear it was the one and sometimes
the other; and she was as pretty as ever she could be. She was one
of those girls, so common in Ireland, whom men, with tastes that way
given, feel inclined to take up and devour on the spur of the moment;
and when she liked her lion, she had a look about her which seemed to
ask to be devoured. There are girls so cold-looking,--pretty girls,
too, ladylike, discreet, and armed with all accomplishments,--whom to
attack seems to require the same sort of courage, and the same sort
of preparation, as a journey in quest of the north-west passage. One
thinks of a pedestal near the Athenaeum as the most appropriate and
most honourable reward of such courage. But, again, there are other
girls to abstain from attacking whom is, to a man of any warmth
of temperament, quite impossible. They are like water when one is
athirst, like plovers' eggs in March, like cigars when one is out
in the autumn. No one ever dreams of denying himself when such
temptation comes in the way. It often happens, however, that in spite
of appearances, the water will not come from the well, nor the egg
from its shell, nor will the cigar allow itself to be lit. A girl of
such appearance, so charming, was Mary Flood Jones of Killaloe, and
our hero Phineas was not allowed to thirst in