“Well, I shall be slishing and sloshing to you when I come home, Mrs. Twomey!” said Christian, who was skilled in converse with such as Mrs. Twomey; “but it will be in French.  I suppose you talked German to your Boston doctor?”

“H’th indeed!  Little enough I said to him!  I never had anny wish for thim docthors at all.  Look at the little rakeen that’s after gettin’ the Dispinsary at Cunnock-a-Ceoil!  Three hundred pound the father ped for it for him!  A low, hungry little fella, that’d thravel the counthry for the sake of a ha’penny—­God!”

The flow of Mrs. Twomey’s eloquence ceased in shock, as Major Talbot-Lowry and Miss Coppinger emerged from the dairy behind her.

“Well, Mary,” said Dick, “who is it who’s so hard up for ha’pence?”

Mrs. Twomey’s equanimity was not slow to re-establish itself.  She and the Major were “the one age,” and they had grown up together.

“Why then, your Honour knows him well, and too well!” she snapped at him, looking up his long length to his handsome, good natured face, much as a minute female cur-dog might look and snap, presuming on her sex, at a Great Dane.  “It’s the new little docthor, Danny Aherne, that your Honour is afther putting in the Dispinsary!”

“Oh, that poor little fellow?” said Dick, laughing, but with a touch of discomposure; “I didn’t put him there.  What’s the matter with him, any how?  Why, he hasn’t been at the job three months!  Give the man time, Mary, give him time!  I’ll engage you’ll all be in love with him by this time next year!”

Mrs. Twomey glanced at Miss Coppinger, and replied with decorous piety: 

“God grant it!”

She then, with an admirable assumption of respect for her superiors, and zeal for her office, moved past her visitors into the dairy.

Dick Talbot-Lowry hesitated a moment or two, then he laughed again, and strode after her into the dark dairy; Miss Coppinger followed him.  Mrs. Twomey, a tiny and almost imperceptible bundle, was already on her knees in a corner, scrubbing a glistening metal churn, and so engrossed in her task as to be unaware of her visitors.

“Look here, Mary,” began the Major, with a touch of severity; “what’s all this about Doctor Aherne?”

Mrs. Twomey rose from her knees, dried her little scarlet claws in her apron, and stood to attention.  Having opened the debate by calling fervently upon her God to witness that she knew nothing of the matter, she proceeded, like a solo pianist, to run her fingers, as it were, lightly over the keys.  Passing swiftly from her own birth, upbringing, invincible respectability, and remoteness from all neighbours, or knowledge of neighbours, she coruscated in a cadenza in which the families of Talbot-Lowry and Coppinger, and her devotion to both, were dazzlingly blended, and finished in a grand chord on the apparently irrelevant fact that she would die dead before she would put down any dirty stain before the Major’s honour.