It is indeed hardly fair to expect of Tishy Mangan that she should be worthy of such a setting as southern Irish woods can offer in the month of May.  It is the month of the Mother of God, and in the fair demesne of Coppinger’s Court, Heaven had truly visited the earth, and was chiefly and specially manifest in the Wood of the Ownashee.  The trees stood with their feet bathed in the changeful, passionate blue of the wild hyacinths, a blue that lay sometimes in deep pools, sometimes in thin drifts, like the azure of far skies; the pale ferns rose in it, “like sweet thoughts in a dream”; the grey stems of the beeches were chequered with the sunlight that their thin branches and little leaves tried in vain to baffle and keep at bay.  From the unseen river came varying voices; sometimes a soft chuckle that had the laughing heart of the spring in it, sometimes a rich and rushing harmony, that told of distant heights and the wind on the hills.  There was a blackbird who was whistling over and over again the opening bar of the theme of a presto, that, only last week, Larry had heard, whipped out with frolic glee by the violins of a London orchestra.  He wondered if, with such themes, it is the blackbirds who inspire the musicians, or if both have access to the same secret well of music, in which each can dip his little bucket, and bring listeners in the outer world a taste of the living water of melody.  But since (in spite of the Artistic Temperament) he was a normal boy, what he said was: 

“Stunning!  Isn’t it!” while he stood still, waiting, for the hidden artist to favour them with another flourish of that gay string of jewels.  “He’s ‘recapturing’ it all right, eh?”

The much-quoted quotation passed by Tishy as the idle wind.  Even had she recognised the allusion, she would have considered the professional raptures of a blackbird a rather dull subject of conversation.  The gallants of Cluhir did not deal in such matters in tete a tete with her, and she thought, as she had thought at the children’s party, long ago, that Larry, if not quite a bore, might, in spite of Coppinger’s Court, rather easily become one.

“Oh, he’s stunning enough!” she replied, with her full-throated, contralto laugh; “It must be his first cousin we have in the garden behind Number Six!  Dad says he doesn’t know, does him or me sing the loudest!”

By Jove!  She sings! thought Larry (as he was meant to think).  Of course!  What a fool he was to have forgotten it!  And as, at this period of his career, of the three arts, who were always riding a pace in his soul, Music, Painting, and Literature, Music happened to be the leading horse, Larry looked upon Tishy with eyes in which a new ardour had awakened, and proceeded with his accustomed speed to mature the details of the concert upon which he had, during the last sixty seconds, enthusiastically decided.