ng, unlocked the door,
whipped out the key, and placed it where I had found it in the
beginning. She seemed to think of everything in a moment, and I would
have left her letter and the papers on the table if it hadn't been for
that cleverest of all girls, who, besides her lips of honey, had an
alert mind, which is one of the things appreciated in Ireland. I then
followed her quickly down a narrow back stairway and out into a glass
house, where a little door at the end led us into a deliciously
shaded walk, free from all observation, with a thick screen of trees
on the right hand and the old stone wall on the left.

Here I sprang quickly to overtake her, but she danced away like a
fairy in the moonlight, throwing a glance of mischief over her
shoulder at me, with her finger on her lips. It seemed to me a pity
that so sylvan a dell should merely be used for the purposes of speed,
but in a jiffy Mary was at the little door in the wall and had the
bolts drawn back, and I was outside before I understood what had
happened, listening to bolts being thrust back again, and my only
consolation was the remembrance of a little dab at my lips as I passed
through, as brief and unsatisfactory as the peck of a sparrow.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was a beautiful day, as lovely as any an indulgent Providence had
ever bestowed upon an unthankful generation.

Although I wished I had had an hour or two to spend with Mary
wandering up and down that green alley through which we had rushed
with such indecent haste, all because two aged and angry members of
the nobility might have come upon us, yet I walked through the streets
of London as if I trod on the air, and not on the rough cobble-stones
of the causeway. It seemed as if I had suddenly become a boy again,
and yet with all the strength and vigour of a man, and I was hard put
to it not to shout aloud in the sunlight, or to slap on the back the
slow and solemn Englishmen I met, who looked as if they had never
laughed in their lives. Sure it's a very serious country, this same
land of England, where their dignity is so oppressive that it bows
down head and shoulders with thinking how grand they are; and yet I'll
say nothing against them, for it was an Englishwoman that made me feel
like a balloon. Pondering over the sobriety of the nation, I found
myself in the shadow of a great church, and, remembering what my dear
Mary had said, I turned and went in through the open door, with my
hat