‘Yes, yes; that’s exactly how she used to speak,’ exclaimed Cecilia, laughing.  And, as the girls advanced through the oakwood, they helped each other through the briers and over the trunks of fallen trees, talking, the while, of their past life, which now seemed to them but one long, sweet joy.  A reference to how May Gould used to gallop the pony round and round the field at the back of the convent was interrupted by the terrifying sound of a cock-pheasant getting up from some bracken under their very feet; and, amid the scurrying of rabbits in couples and half-dozens, modest allusion was made to the girls who had been expelled in ’75.  Absorbed in the sweetness of the past, the girls mused, until they emerged from the shade of the woods into the glare and dust of the highroad.  Then came a view of rocky country, with harvesters working in tiny fields, and then the great blue background of the Clare Mountains was suddenly unfolded.  A line and a bunch of trees indicated the Brennan domain.  The gate-lodge was in ruins, and the weed-grown avenue was covered with cow-dung.

‘Which of the girls do you like best?’ said Alice, who wished to cease thinking of the poverty in which the spinsters lived.

’Emily, I think; she doesn’t say much, but she is more sensible than the other two.  Gladys wearies me with her absurd affectations; Zoe is well enough, but what names!’

‘Yes, Emily has certainly the best of the names,’ Alice replied, laughing.

‘Are the Miss Brennans at home?’ said Cecilia, when the maid opened the hall-door.

‘Yes, miss—­I mean your ladyship—­will you walk in?’

’You’ll see, they’ll keep us waiting a good half-hour while they put on their best frocks,’ said Cecilia, as she sat down in a faded arm-chair in the middle of the room.  A piano was rolled close against the wall, the two rosewood cabinets were symmetrically placed on either side of the farther window; from brass rods the thick, green curtains hung in stiff folds, and, since the hanging of some water-colours, done by Zoe before leaving school, no alterations, except the removal of the linen covers from the furniture when visitors were expected, had been made in the arrangement of the room.

The Brennan family consisted of three girls—­Gladys, Zoe, and Emily.  Thirty-three, thirty-one, and thirty were their respective ages.  Their father and mother, dead some ten or a dozen years, had left them joint proprietors of a small property that gossip had magnified to three thousand.  They were known as the heiresses of Kinvarra; snub noses and blue eyes betrayed their Celtic blood; and every year they went to spend a month at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, returning home with quite a little trousseau.  Gladys and Zoe always dressed alike, from the bow round the neck to the bow on the little shoe that they so artlessly with drew when in the presence of gentlemen.  Gladys’ formula for receiving visitors never varied: