I'd as leave have a French whip over me as an English!" He came a step
nearer, his voice lowered a little. "Have you heard the latest news from
France? They're coming with a good-sized fleet down to the south coast.
Have you heard it?"

"Oh, there's plenty one hears one doesn't believe is gospel," answered
Dyck, his eyes half closing. "I'm not believing all I hear, as if it was
a prayer-meeting. Anything may happen here; Ireland's a woman--very
uncertain."

Dyck flicked some dust from his waistcoat, and dropped his eyes, because
he was thinking of two women he had known; one of them an angel now in
company of her sister angels--his mother; the other a girl he had met on
the hills of Connemara, a wonderfully pretty girl of seventeen. How
should he know that the girl was Erris Boyne's daughter?--although there
were times when some gesture of Boyne, some quick look, some lifting of
the eyebrows, brought back the memory of Sheila Llyn, as it did now.

Since Dyck left his old home he had seen her twice; once at Loyland
Towers, and once at her home in Limerick. The time he had spent with her
had been very brief, but full of life, interest, and character. She was
like some piquant child, bold, beautiful, uncertain, caressing in her
manner one instant, and distant at another.

She had said radiant things, had rallied him, had shown him where a
twenty-nine-pound salmon had been caught in a stream, and had fired at
and brought down a pheasant outside the covert at Loyland Towers.
Whether at Loyland Towers, or at her mother's house in Limerick, there
was no touch of forwardness in her, or in anything she said or did. She
was the most natural being, the freest from affectation, he had ever