“Oh, I do, very much,” said Christian, trying hard not to quench the smoking flax; “I’ve learnt quantities by heart, and Larry is always lending me new books of poetry.  He says that you and he discuss it together.”

“I never knew one like him!” said Barty, with sudden energy.  “There’s no subject at all that he’s not interested in!” In the heat of his enthusiasm for Larry, the cocoon wrappings were temporarily shrivelled.  He turned his dark short-sighted eyes on Christian, and took up his parable with excitement.

“Did he tell you he’s learning Irish?  I’ll engage it’ll be no trouble to him!”

“He’s always getting hold of new ideas,” said Christian; “I wish I could learn Irish.”

“There’s a branch of the Gaelic League in Cluhir,” said Barty, eagerly.  “There are a lot learning Irish.  I suppose you wouldn’t be disposed to become a member, Miss Christian?” He gazed at her imploringly.

“I don’t know if I should be allowed,” said Christian, hesitatingly.  “You see I’ve only just come home.  I’ve been at school in Paris for the last two years—­”

A memory of a ferocious denunciation of the Gaelic League by her father came to her; she wondered what Barty would do if she offered him one of the profane imitations of the Major that had earned for her the laurels of the schoolroom.

“Oh, I’m quite sure I mightn’t become a Gaelic Leaguer!” she repeated, beginning to laugh, while samples of her father’s rhetoric welled up in her mind.

Barty thought he had never seen anything so enchanting as her face, as she looked at him, laughing, with wavering lights, filtered through young beech leaves, in her eyes.  He felt a delirious desire to show her that he was not a tongue-tied fool; that he also, like Larry, was a man of ideas.

“I wish to God!” he said, with the disordered violence of a shy man, “that there was anny league or society in Ireland that would override class prejudice, and oblitherate religious bigotry!”

He had snatched a paragraph from his last address to the Gaelic Leaguers of Cluhir, and with it was betrayed into the pronunciation that mastered him in moments of excitement.

Christian said to herself that she thanked heaven Judith wasn’t there to make her laugh.

“I don’t think I’m a religious bigot,” she said, with a faint tremor in her voice, “but one never knows!” Her head was bent down, the brim of her large hat hid her face.

Barty was stricken.  What devil had possessed him?  She was hurt!  She was a Protestant, and in his cursed folly he had made her think he was reproaching her for Bigotry.  Good God!  What could he do?

Two emotions, hung, as it were, on hair-triggers, held the stage.  In Christian, the fiend of laughter held sway, in poor Barty, the angel of tears.  It was perhaps well for them both that their next step in advance took them round a bend in the path, and brought them face to face with the picnic.