“All’s one so long as it’s beautiful:  yes, you speak for me.  Cosmopolitanism of races is a different affair.  I beg leave to doubt the true union of some; Irish and Saxon, for example, let Cupid be master of the ceremonies and the dwelling-place of the happy couple at the mouth of a Cornucopia.  Yet I have seen a flower of Erin worn by a Saxon gentleman proudly; and the Hibernian courting a Rowena!  So we’ll undo what I said, and consider it cancelled.”

“Are you of the rebel party, Colonel De Craye?”

“I am Protestant and Conservative, Miss Middleton.”

“I have not a head for politics.”

“The political heads I have seen would tempt me to that opinion.”

“Did Willoughby say when he would be back?”

“He named no particular time.  Doctor Middleton and Mr. Whitford are in the library upon a battle of the books.”

“Happy battle!”

“You are accustomed to scholars.  They are rather intolerant of us poor fellows.”

“Of ignorance perhaps; not of persons.”

“Your father educated you himself, I presume?”

“He gave me as much Latin as I could take.  The fault is mine that it is little.”

“Greek?”

“A little Greek.”

“Ah!  And you carry it like a feather.”

“Because it is so light.”

“Miss Middleton, I could sit down to be instructed, old as I am.  When women beat us, I verily believe we are the most beaten dogs in existence.  You like the theatre?”

“Ours?”

“Acting, then.”

“Good acting, of course.”

“May I venture to say you would act admirably?”

“The venture is bold, for I have never tried.”

“Let me see; there is Miss Dale and Mr. Whitford; you and I; sufficient for a two-act piece.  The Irishman in Spain would do.”  He bent to touch the grass as she stepped on it.  “The lawn is wet.”

She signified that she had no dread of wet, and said:  “English women afraid of the weather might as well be shut up.”

De Craye proceeded:  “Patrick O’Neill passes over from Hibernia to Iberia, a disinherited son of a father in the claws of the lawyers, with a letter of introduction to Don Beltran d’Arragon, a Grandee of the First Class, who has a daughter Dona Seraphina (Miss Middleton), the proudest beauty of her day, in the custody of a duenna (Miss Dale), and plighted to Don Fernan, of the Guzman family (Mr. Whitford).  There you have our dramatis personae.”

“You are Patrick?”

“Patrick himself.  And I lose my letter, and I stand on the Prado of Madrid with the last portrait of Britannia in the palm of my hand, and crying in the purest brogue of my native land:  ’It’s all through dropping a letter I’m here in Iberia instead of Hibernia, worse luck to the spelling!’”

“But Patrick will be sure to aspirate the initial letter of Hibernia.”