Alice’s eyes as she looked at him were expressive of her thoughts—­they beamed at once with pity and admiration.  He was but the ordinary handsome young man that in England nature seems to reproduce in everlasting stereotype.  Long graceful legs, clad in tight-fitting trousers, slender hips rising architecturally to square wide shoulders, a thin strong neck and a tiny head—­yes, a head so small that an artist would at once mark off eight on his sheet of double elephant.  And now he lay over the back of a chair weeping like a child; in the intensity of his grief he was no longer commonplace; and as Alice looked at this superb animal thrown back in a superb abandonment of pose, her heart filled with the natural pity that the female feels always for the male in distress, and the impulse within her was to put her arms about him and console him; and then she understood her sister’s passion for him, and her mind formulated it thus:  ’How handsome he is!  Any girl would like a man like that.’  And as Alice surrendered herself to those sensuous, or rather romantic feelings, her nature quickened to a sense of pleasure, and she grew gentler with him, and was glad to listen while he sobbed out his sorrows to her.

‘Oh, why,’ he exclaimed, ’did she fall over that thrice-accursed stile!  In five minutes more we would have been in each other’s arms, and for ever.  I had a couple of the best post-horses in Gort; they’d have taken us to Athenry in a couple of hours, and then—­Oh! what luck, what luck!’

’But do you not know that Olive met Mrs. Lawler in the wood, and that it was she who—­’

’What do you say?  You don’t mean to tell me that it was Mrs. Lawler who prevented Olive from meeting me?  Oh, what beasts, what devils women are,’ he said; ’and the worst of it is that one cannot be even with them, and they know it.  If you only knew,’ he said, turning almost fiercely upon Alice, ’how I loved your sister, you would pity me; but I suppose it is all over now.  Is she very ill?’

’We don’t know yet.  She has sprained her ankle very badly, and is shivering terribly; she was lying out all night in the wet wood.’

He did not answer at once.  He walked once or twice up and down the room, and then he said, taking Alice’s hand in his, ’Will you be a friend to me, Miss Barton?’ He could get no further, for tears were rolling down his cheeks.

Alice looked at him tenderly; she was much touched by the manifestation of his love, and at the end of a long silence she said: 

’Now, Captain Hibbert, I want you to listen to me.  Don’t cry any more, but listen.’

‘I dare say I look a great fool.’

‘No, indeed you do not,’ she answered; and then in kindly worded phrases she told him that, at least for the present, he must not attempt to correspond with Olive.  ’Give me your word of honour that you will neither write nor speak to her for, let us say, six months, and I will promise to be your friend.’