that he found irritating).  He was learning the meaning of the sudden silences, the too obvious changes of the course of conversation, that seemed to occur when he drew near.  He had not, as yet, formulated these things to himself, but, on this turbulent afternoon, it was possibly some livelier apprehension of them that made him gravitate towards Barty Mangan, as towards a fellow pariah, and induced him to seek with him the far asylum of the schoolroom.  There, save for the schoolroom cat, they were alone, and they sat for some minutes in grateful silence, looking out, across misty stretches of grass, to the river, and beyond it to the dense green of the trees of Coppinger’s Court.  The sky was very low and grey; by leaning out of the window a little, a far-off reach of river, at the western end of the valley, could be descried; above it there was a narrow slit in the clouds, and through it a faint and lovely primrose light fell, like a veil, that hid, while it told of the deathbed repentance of the dying day.  Larry dragged his chair into the corner of the window, and watched the growing glory of the sunset with all his ardent soul in his eyes.

Whatever this boy did, he did vividly, and to Barty Mangan, seated on the shadow side, watching him, he was, as ever, a pageant, a being of incalculable impulse, of flashing intensity and splendour.

“Where on earth did you go, Barty?  I looked about for you for ages before I found you; but there was such an awful crowd of women—­I’m jolly glad to get out of it!” Larry leaned back in his chair and proceeded to light a cigarette, as an assertion of the rights of a man of nearly seventeen.

“My father was taking Tishy and me about, showing us the house,” replied Barty, apologetically. (As a matter of fact, he said “me fawther,” but if this, and similar details of pronunciation, are not known by nature, it is labour in vain to attempt to indicate them by means of the wholly inadequate English alphabet.) “Larry,” he went on, with the candour that made a gentleman of him, “I never was in a house like this before.  I declare to you it frightens me!  I feel like a rat gone astray!  I was in the dining-room by myself, looking at the pictures, and that old fella’ of a butler came in and frightened the heels off me!  He kept an eye on me that was like a flame from a blow-pipe!  You’d say he thought I was going to steal the house!”

“I expect he did, too,” said Larry, “especially if he thought that you were a pal of mine.  He hates me like blazes.  He’s one of those damned Orangemen.  I say, do you remember that thing in The Spirit of the Nation, ‘Orange and Green will carry the Day’?  I bet old Evans would rather lose, any day, than be ‘linked in his might’ with a Papist like you or me!  It’s a most extraordinary thing how religion plays the devil with Ireland!”