Major Talbot-Lowry became more interested.

“You don’t say old Tom’s son is a doctor!  By Jove!  That’s very creditable to him—­a decent old fellow Tom was—­and you say he wants to hunt?  That’s the right sort of doctor!  Look here!”

Dick sat up, the light of inspiration woke in his ingenuous blue eyes, he wrinkled his forehead with the super-intelligent concentration of a not very brilliant intellect.  “Didn’t I hear that old Fogarty is giving up the Dispensary here?  Why don’t you run him for that?”

The shepherding of Dick Lowry was really an affair of a simplicity unworthy of preparation made by that ruse old collie, the Big Doctor.  Nevertheless, being an artist, he continued to play the game.

“Knock Ceoil!  Begad, that’s a great notion!  Now I come to think of it, I did hear something of old Fogarty giving up, but somehow I never thought of young Danny Aherne in connection with it.  I thought I was as well able as any man to put two and two together, but I declare I might never have thought of it if it hadn’t been for you!  They say, if you’re too close to a thing, you can’t see it!”

Thus did the collie yap, while the sheep (who was a member of the Dispensary Committee) gratified, and pleasantly conscious of originality, trotted up the path and into the fold that had been prepared for it.

Meanwhile, in what house-agents call the reception-rooms, the Sale of Work raged on, with auctions, with raffles, with card-fortunes, told in a cave of rugs by a devoted sorceress, in a temperature that would inure her to face with composure the witch’s destiny at the stake; with “occasional music,” that fell upon the turmoil of talk more softly than any petals from blown roses on the grass, and was just sufficiently perceptible to impart the requisite flavour of festivity.  One item of the musical programme had indeed had power to still the storm, but since it was contributed by the Mangan Quartet, it must be admitted that, charming though it was, it owed something of its success to surprise.  The countryside had rallied to Lady Isabel with a response that did credit to her as to them, yet, thronged though the rooms were the Mangan family shone with a unique lustre as alone representing the mighty Church of Rome.

“Wonderful of them to come!” said the Church of Ireland ladies approvingly; “the only R.C.’s here!”

Yet the Mangan family was not quite alone in this representative position; young Mr. Coppinger, their (as it were) inventor and patentee, shared it with them, and was, moreover, beginning, for the first time, and not without displeasure, to realise something of the social complications that are involved by the difference of creed.  It was a matter of atmosphere; quite intangible, and quite perceptible.  Larry was discovering that he was something of an anomaly.  “Only an R.C. by accident,” as he had heard someone say, in apparent extenuation (a benevolence