Georgy, aged but 19, just home from far and forlorn seas, with, as the poet says, a heart for any fate, might have been excused for swallowing any good provided for him by the gods, whole, and without criticism, but for Mr. St. Lawrence Coppinger, lately come of age, a man of taste, endowed with special finesse of feeling, it might have been expected that a highly-coloured peacock butterfly would have had but scant appeal.  In fact, one is driven back upon the young May Moon as the sole plausible explanation of the fact that, on that afternoon of bewitchment, Tishy Mangan went to Larry’s head.

These temporary aberrations are afflictions for which the most refined young men must occasionally be prepared, and Larry’s overthrow was not without justification.  Quite apart from her looks—­and anyone would have been forced to admit that they were undeniable—­there was her voice, the true contralto timbre, thick and mellow, dark and sweet, like heather honey, he thought, while he and Georgy sprawled on the grass at her feet (and she had good feet) making very indifferent jokes, in that exaggerated travesty of an Irish brogue which is often all that an English school will leave with Irish boys, and vicing with each other in the folly proper to such an occasion.

“I don’t see your shoe-buckles!” Larry said, looking from her feet to her lips, with a meaning and impudent lift of his blue eyes.  “Have you given up wearing them?”

Tishy’s colour deepened; she remembered instantly what she was meant to remember.

“You’re regretting the choice you made, are you?” she said, with a toss of her head.  “Never fear!  The buckles will be there when they’re wanted!”

“Don’t trouble about them!” says Larry, tremendously pleased with his success as a flirtatious man of the world; “I don’t think they will be required!”

It is necessary to have attained to a reasonably advanced age to be able to recognise pathos in the fatuities that so frequently form a feature of love’s young dream.  Christian, listening with one ear to her brother and cousin, while into the other the genuine idiom of her native land flowed, ardently, from the now unsealed lips of Barty Mangan, began to wonder why the boys were talking like stage Irishmen; Georgy, she knew, was idiot enough for anything, but she had to admit to herself that Larry, also, was rather overdoing it.  Christian was able to feel amused, but she also felt, quite illogically, that what had been distaste for Tishy Mangan was rapidly deepening into dislike.

The picnic raged on, with prodigious eatings and drinkings, with capsizings of teapots in full sail, with disastrous slaughterings of insects (disastrous to plates and tablecloths rather than to the insects) with facetious doings with heated tea-spoons and pellets of bread, with, in short, all that Mrs. Mangan and her fellow hostesses expected of a truly prosperous picnic.