‘What news?’ Alice asked, with a view to escaping from wearying questions; and Olive told her a bailiff’s house had been broken into by an armed gang.  ’They dragged him out of his bed and shot him in the legs before his own door.  And an attempt has been made to blow up a landlord’s house with dynamite.  And in Queen’s County shots have been fired through a dining-room window—­now, what else?  I am telling you a lot; I don’t often remember what is in the paper.  No end of hayricks were burnt last week, and some cattle have had their tails cut off, and a great many people have been beaten.  Lord Dungory says he doesn’t know how it will all end unless the Government bring in a Coercion Act.  What do you think, Alice?’

Alice dropped some formal remarks, and Olive hoped that the state of the country would not affect the Castle’s season.  She didn’t know which of the St. Leonard girls would be married first.  She asked Alice to guess.  Alice said she couldn’t guess, and fell to thinking that nobody would ever want to marry her.  It was as if some instinct had told her, and she could not drive the word ‘celibacy’ out of her ears.  It seemed to her that she was fichue a jamais, as that odious Lord Dungory would say.  She did not remember that she had ever been so unhappy before, and it seemed to her that she would always be unhappy, fichue a jamais.

But to her surprise she awoke in a more cheerful mood, and when she came down to breakfast Mr. Barton raised his head from the newspaper and asked her if she had heard that Lord Rosshill had been fired at.

‘Yes, father.  Olive told me so overnight;’ and the conversation turned on her headache, and then on the state of Ireland.

Mrs. Barton asked if this last outrage would prove sufficient to force the Government to pass a new Coercion Bill.

‘I wish they would put me at the head of an army,’ Mr. Barton said, whose thoughts had gone back to his picture—­Julius Caesar overturning the Altars of the Druids.

’Papa would look fine leading the landlords against the tenants dressed in Julius Caesar’s big red cloak!’ cried Mrs. Barton, turning back as she glided out of the room, already deep in consideration of what Milord would like to eat for luncheon and the gown she would wear that afternoon.  Mr. Barton threw the newspaper aside and returned to his studio; and in the girls’ room Olive and Barnes, the bland, soft smiling maid, began their morning gossip.  Whatever subject was started it generally wound round to Captain Hibbert.  Alice had wearied of his name, but this morning she pricked up her ears.  She was surprised to hear her sister say she had forbidden him ever to visit the Lawlers.  At that moment the dull sound of distant firing broke the stillness of the snow.

’I took good care to make Captain Hibbert promise not to go to this shooting-party the last time I saw him.’

‘And what harm was there in his going to this shooting-party?’ said Alice.