“Do you?  Do you?” said Barty, intensely.  “I’m glad you do!  I feel often as if no one cared for this miserable country except for what they could get out of it!  At the election it would have sickened you, the bargaining, and the humbugging, and the lies.  Larry was the only man that ran straight, and they jockeyed him—­”

“I’m sure you ran straight,” said Christian, with sympathy in her voice.  Piercing her weariness and preoccupation was the feeling that he had something to say that lay under this babble of conversation.  He was wrapping himself in a cloak of verbiage, but above the cloak his tormented eyes met hers, and the pain in them hurt her.

“Me?  Oh, I only ran after Larry.  I thought it was a shabby thing of the Unionists not to have supported him—­” he stopped abruptly, remembering Major Talbot-Lowry’s abstention, remembering also the feud, of which he knew only that he had never wholly divined its origin, between Coppinger’s Court and Mount Music.  He cursed himself for a fool.  He had not meant to talk politics, but what he had come through the storm to say was so difficult.  He looked at Christian with agony.  Had she minded what he said about the Unionists?  He began to talk again, very fast and incoherently.

“Miss Christian, I said awhile ago everything was changing in Ireland.  There’s big changes coming, even hereabouts, things I couldn’t believe would ever happen.  I’ve recently learned a—­a fact—­a statement that I’m not at liberty to repeat.  I was—­I may say that I was shocked—­but Miss Christian—­” the agony in his eyes was in his voice.  “Oh!  Miss Christian, for God’s sake, believe that I knew nothing of it till this day!”

He stood up, steadying himself with a hand on one of the high marble pillars of the mantelpiece.

“Knew nothing of what?” said Christian, thinking she had mistaken what he had said.

“I can’t tell you—­you’ll know soon enough—­only I’m just asking you to believe that I had neither part nor lot in it!”

Christian had risen, and was standing up; he came a step nearer.

“I just want you to understand, Miss Christian, that in this world there is no one I regard like you—­no one, nor ever was, nor ever will be—­but don’t mind that, I only want to say that if there is anything in this earthly world that it’s in my power to do for you, or that I could help you in anny shape or form, you will be showing the kindness and mercy of God if you will let me do it for you.”

He was trembling, and his voice shook, but his nervousness was gone.  “The kindness and mercy of God!” he said again.  “I would feel it to be that—­oh, God!  I would!” The tortured spirit in his eyes had given place to another spirit, whose emotion Christian could neither mistake nor respond to, yet its kinship with the immutable fidelity that was in her heart made an appeal that she could not refuse.