Then, in turn, each ejaculated a few words.

Mrs. Barton said:  ’It is dreadful to think there are such wicked people in the world.’

Mr. Adair said:  ’There can be no doubt but that we have arrived at the crisis; Europe will ring with the echoes of the crime.’

Olive said:  ’I think they ought to hang Mr. Parnell; I believe it was he who drove the car.’

Mr. Barton said:  ’The landlords and Land-Leaguers will have to do what I say; they will have to fight it out.  Now, at their head, I believe by a series of rapid marches—­’

‘Arthur, Arthur, I beg of you,’ exclaimed Mrs. Barton.

‘We shall all have to emigrate,’ Sir Charles murmured reflectively.

‘The law is in abeyance,’ said Mr. Lynch.

‘Precisely,’ replied Milord; ’and as I once said to Lord Granville, “Les moeurs sont les hommes, mais la loi est la raison du pays."’

Mr. Adair looked up; he seemed about to contest the truth of this aphorism, but he relapsed into his consideration of Mr. Gladstone’s political integrity.  The conversation had fallen, but at the end of a long silence Mr. Ryan said: 

‘Begorra, I am very glad they were murthered.’

All drew back instinctively.  This was too horrible, and doubt of Mr. Ryan’s sanity was expressed on every face.

At last Mr. Adair said, conscious that he was expressing the feelings of the entire company:  ’What do you mean, sir?  Have you gone mad?  Do you not know that this is no fitting time for buffoonery?’

‘Will ye hear me cousin out?’ said Mr. Lynch.

‘Begorra, I’m glad they were murthered,’ continued Mr. Ryan; ’for if they hadn’t been we’d have been—­there’s the long and the short of it.  I know the counthry well, and I know that in six months more, without a proper Coercion Act, we’d have been burned in our beds.’

The unanswerableness of Mr. Ryan’s words, and the implacable certainty which forced itself into every heart, that he spoke but the truth, did not, however, make the company less inclined to oppose the utilitarian view he took of the tragedy.

Unfinished phrases . . .  ‘Disgraceful’ . . .  ‘Shocking’ . . .  ‘Inconceivable’ . . .  ‘That anyone should say such a thing’ . . . were passed round, and a disposition was shown to boycott Mr. Ryan.

Mr. Adair spoke of not sitting in the room where such opinions were expressed, but Milord was seen whispering to him, ’We’re not in a room, Adair, we’re out of doors;’ and Mrs. Barton, always anxious to calm troubled lives, suggested that ‘people did not mean all they said.’  Mr. Ryan, however, maintained through it all an attitude of stolid indifference, the indifference of a man who knows that all must come back sooner or later to his views.