“Come up, Tishy, till I talk to you!” shouted Mrs. Mangan, slinging a long gold watch-chain over her head and festooning it upon her ample bosom:  “Did you meet Pappy?” she continued, as her daughter’s steps drew near.

“I did to be sure,” returned Miss Letitia, coming into her mother’s room and flinging herself into an armchair, “when I was crossing the bridge it was.  He roared to me to hurry you and Hannah.  Holy Mary Joseph!  How stiff I am!  That old horn on the saddle has the right leg cut off me!”

“Well, never mind your legs now,” replied Mrs. Mangan, peremptorily, “what I want to know is what sort is this young man that Pappy’s bringing in on top of us?  In God’s name, why couldn’t he be let go home to his own?”

“‘Young man’ is it!” retorted Tishy; “he’s nothing but a boy at school, and a cross boy too!  Such beating of his pony as he had when he wouldn’t jump for him!  Didn’t I try and make poor Zoe go before him, and th’ eye he cast at her!  I thought he’d beat me, too!”

“Oh, and is a boy all he is then?” said Mrs. Mangan, with relief in her voice:  “you’d think by the work your father had ’twas the Lord Leftenant was in it!  Run away now, Tishy, like a good girl, and get those clothes off you, and help Hannah with Barty’s room.  Boy or man or whatever he is, he must have a bed under him!”

It was a very deplorable boy who presently arrived at No. 6, The Mall, Cluhir, and was practically lifted off the car by the Big Doctor.  Francis Aloysius Mangan had many aspects of character of an undesirable kind, but they were linked with one virtue, the Irish gift, of a good-natured heart.  With his enormous thick hands, that made Larry think of a tiger’s paws, he undressed the boy as cleverly and gently as he had set the broken bones of his wrist.  Mrs. Mangan and Hannah had not failed; the soup and the jars were, as the latter authority had pronounced, “as hot as love,” similarly passioned was the ardour of the whisky-punch, with which the proceedings had opened.  Combined with a subsequent sleeping-draught, it conferred the boon of sleep, and for some hours, at all events, Larry forgot his recently-acquired knowledge of what pain was.  But not for many hours.  In the long darkness of the winter morning he lay with a fast mounting temperature, while he made the discovery, common to all in his case, that upon the particular bone that has been broken, the entire existence pivots.  And, in addition to the broken bone, by the time that Miss Frederica had driven in from Coppinger’s Court, there was but little doubt that what Dr. Mangan called, lightly, “a touch of pneumonia,” would keep young Mr. Coppinger in Barty’s room for a time unspecified.

Miss Frederica drove home again in a seriously perturbed frame of mind, and with indignation against the decrees of Providence hot within her.

“I wired for a nurse for him!” she said to Lady Isabel, “I could not plant myself upon them!  It’s all most uncomfortable and unavoidable.  Of course they’ve been extremely kind—­”