The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind.  The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning’s song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences.  The performance raged to its close in a “Cake Walk,” to the inspiring strains of “Razors a-flying through the air,” and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar Independent described cryptically as “a tout ensemble a la conversazione that was refreshingly unique”.

“Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!” said Mrs. Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk’s room, “but it all went splendidly!  Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me the vaseline.  The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!”

Rupert Gunning approached Fanny with an open note in his hand.

“I’ve had this from your aunt,” he said, handing it to her; it was decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which Fanny’s black claw contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a smile.

It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr. Gunning had to pass their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive their niece home.

“Oh—­” said Fanny, in tones from which dismay was by no means eliminated.  “How stupid of Aunt Rachel!”

“I’m afraid there seems no way out of it for you,” said Rupert offendedly.

A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the glass abruptly checked Fanny’s desire to say something crushing.  At this juncture she would rather have died than laughed.

Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when, half an hour later, Fanny Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr. Gunning’s trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the loiterers say compassionately:—­

“God help her, the crayture!  She looks like a servant that’d be bate out with work!”

Mr. Gunning’s new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the various commotions of the street—­she understood them all perfectly well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent them as impertinences.  Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses.  On the open road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down.  Rupert turned to his silent companion.  He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.