“What made me indignant,” said Mrs. St. George, in emulous depreciation, ignoring this flight of fancy, “was their not having ‘God save the King’!  A cowardly concession to the Gaelic League, of course!  I really think that Georgy, who is in the Navy, might have insisted upon it!”

“They did discuss it,” said Frederica, forced by her friend into the position of devil’s advocate, “but they were afraid of the sixpenny seats.  The Mangans said that there would inevitably be rows.  They have had to give up having it at anything now.”

This was unanswerable, and Mrs. St. George tacitly accepted defeat.

“I believe that young Mangan is simply a Rebel” resumed Mrs. Kirby, portentously.  “Bill thinks he’ll go too far some day, and the police will have to take notice of him.  But with the Government yielding and pandering—­”

Here, at least, was a subject on which all three disputants were in complete agreement.  Wolfe Tone or Robert Emmet could hardly have abhorred the Government of England more heartily than did these three respectable, law-abiding, unalterably-Unionist ladies, and for some time the more recent enormities of the rule upon which they theoretically bestowed their unshakable, allegiance, took precedence of Miss Mangan as a subjct of disapproval.

“Nevertheless,” summed up Mrs. St. George gloomily at the end of a sweeping condemnation, “we must submit.  We can do nothing.  As Courtney says, we can’t cut off cows’ tails and shoot our tenants for not paying their rent! He says—­”

Colonel St. George’s further views were lost in the entrance of the lawn tennis players, rain-sprinkled, heated, bringing with them a lively aroma of trodden grass and wet flannel, and convinced of their superiority to those who had sought shelter, and were now (to quote Miss Talbot-Lowry) soddenly eating all the hot cakes.  Judith had recently returned from one of her forays, and had not spared her family her views on the rapprochement with the musical world of Cluhir that the concert had involved.  She was now seated with Bill Kirby on a secluded sofa in a corner of the long drawing-room, and was entertaining that deeply-enamoured young man with her accustomed fluency.

Mr. Kirby, having petted and patronised Judith in her youth, when he was still nine years older than she, had, since her recent return, awakened to the fact that this difference in age had been mysteriously obliterated, and that at present, Judith was not only his superior in intelligence, but also in all those subsidiary matters in which age is generally and erroneously believed to confer an advantage.

“If it had even been a good concert,” Judith remarked, gobbling tea and cake with a heartiness that, taken in connection with an admirable complexion and very clear blue eyes, was in itself attractive to a hungry young man, “I could have borne it better.  But it was absolutely deadly—­all but just our own people’s turns, of course—­a sort of lyrical geography—­the map of Ireland set to music!  Bantry Bay, Killarney, the Mountains of Somewhere, the Waters of Somewhere else, all Irish, of course!  I get so sick of Ireland and her endearing young charms—­and all the entreaties to Erin to remember!  As if she ever forgot!”