Christian, listening to his ambitions, felt herself older than ever.

“I think I should be a painter all the time, and let Bill keep the hounds for me,” she said, indulgently, “and I certainly should not play with politics—­I’m certain you’d hate them.”

“Well, but I’m pledged, you know!  I’m absolutely in honour bound to play up if I’m wanted—­”

“Whether you know the game or no?” said Christian, mockingly.  “Very sporting!  I’m not a Home Ruler, as it happens.  I’ve no breadth of outlook! I haven’ been in France for four years!”

“You’re a reactionary!” declared Larry; “I tell you Self-Government is in the air!”

With all her suppleness of mind, Christian had in her something of the inbred obstinacy of fidelity that often goes with long descent.  Her colour rose.

“We have always stood for the King!” she said, holding up her head, and looking past Larry to the high, sailing clouds.

Larry began to laugh.

“Christian!  It’s awfully becoming to you to talk politics!  Keep quite quiet and I’ll make a study of you as Britannia—­or Joan of Arc—­”

It was characteristic of these young people, that in the heat of political argument they joined battle as freely as if no other point of contact existed for them.  This it is to be born and bred in Ireland, where people live their opinions, and everyone is a patriot with a different point of view, and politics are a hereditary disease, blatant as a port-wine mark, and persistent as a family nose.

Miss Frederica, with a guilty remembrance of Lady Isabel’s enquiries, had established her weeding apparatus at a bed near the yew-hedge.  She heard the voices raised in discussion, and, catching words here and there, felt that if these were the topics that occupied her charges, Isabel need not have inflicted upon her the abominable nuisance of poking in her nose where it was not wanted.  Thus did Miss Coppinger summarise the duties of a chaperon; but it must be remembered that she had never been broken to the work, and in any case she had been out of harness for four years.

The luncheon gong sounded to her across the Michaelmas daisies, and the tall scarlet lobelias, and the gorgeous dahlias of the September garden; she gathered her tools together and projected a shriek in the direction of the yew hedge.

“Children!  Lunch!”

As, dizzy with stooping, she slowly reared herself to be full height, she saw a black, moving blur on the drive beyond the garden.  She rubbed her eyes; the blur defined itself as a man in priestly black.  Not Mr. Fetherston, a she had first believed, but Father Sweeny.

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing!” thought Frederica, using as was her wont, the well-worn phrase with guileless zest.  She held that although it might not, primarily, have been intended to describe the Roman Catholic Priesthood, its application in a later age was obvious.