She made no remark as she proffered her hand, and she did not smile as Nance had done. Instead, her bright eyes scanned his face with a quick, questioning interest.
In return, he looked at her clear skin, her level eyebrows and proudly held head; and his awkwardness vanished as he took the slight muscular hand still cold from the night mist.
"How d'you do?" he said. "I've been hearing of you."
Again Clodagh coloured, and glanced at her father.
"What were you telling him, father?" she asked with native curiosity.
"Listen to her, James," he said banteringly. "Her conscience is troubling her. She knows that it's hard to speak well of her. Isn't that it, scamp? Confess now!"
Clodagh had again passed round the table; and, having thrown her whip and cap into a chair, had seated herself without ceremony in the vacant place that awaited her.
"Indeed it isn't!" she replied with immense unconcern. But an instant later she repeated her question.
"What was it, father? Can't you tell me?"
Asshlin lifted his glass and studied the light through his sherry.
"Ah now, listen to her, James!" he exclaimed again delightedly. "And women will tell you they aren't inquisitive."
The little sister, seeing the flush, was suddenly moved to assert herself.
"'Twasn't anything, Clo," she said quickly. "He only said you were a scallywag."
Then, as all eyes turned in her direction, she subsided abruptly into confused silence.
"There you are again, James! Look at the way they stick together. A poor man hasn't the ghost of a chance when two of them join forces. One of them ought to have been a boy--if only for the sake of equality."
He shook his head and laughed afresh, while Burke deposited the last plate upon the table, and dinner began in earnest.
That dinner, like his drive from Muskeere, was an experience to Milbanke. More than once his eyes travelled involuntarily from the candle-lit table, with its suggestion of another and an earlier era, to the high walls where the fire cast long shafts of ruddy light and long tongues of shadow upon Asshlin's ancestors, painted in garments of silk and lace that had once found a setting in this same sombre room. There was something strangely analogous in these dead men and women and their living representatives. The thought recurred to him again and again, as he yielded to the pleasant influences of good wine and wholesome food pressed upon him with unceasing hospitality. It was not the first time he had pandered to his taste for past things by comparing a man with his forefathers, but the result had never proved quite so profitable. In their uncommon setting, Asshlin and his children would have appealed to the most unobservant as uncommon types; viewed by the eyes of a student, they became something more; they became types of an uncommon race--of an uncommon class.