Broadbent [submissively taking it].  I can’t sufficiently apologize, Miss Reilly, or express my sense of your kindness when I am in such a disgusting state.  How could I be such a bea—­ [he trips again] damn the heather! my foot caught in it.

Nora.  Steady now, steady.  Come along:  come. [He is led down to the road in the character of a convicted drunkard.  To him there it something divine in the sympathetic indulgence she substitutes for the angry disgust with which one of his own countrywomen would resent his supposed condition.  And he has no suspicion of the fact, or of her ignorance of it, that when an Englishman is sentimental he behaves very much as an Irishman does when he is drunk].

ACT III

Next morning Broadbent and Larry are sitting at the ends of a breakfast table in the middle of a small grass plot before Cornelius Doyle’s house.  They have finished their meal, and are buried in newspapers.  Most of the crockery is crowded upon a large square black tray of japanned metal.  The teapot is of brown delft ware.  There is no silver; and the butter, on a dinner plate, is en bloc.  The background to this breakfast is the house, a small white slated building, accessible by a half-glazed door.  A person coming out into the garden by this door would find the table straight in front of him, and a gate leading to the road half way down the garden on his right; or, if he turned sharp to his left, he could pass round the end of the house through an unkempt shrubbery.  The mutilated remnant of a huge planter statue, nearly dissolved by the rains of a century, and vaguely resembling a majestic female in Roman draperies, with a wreath in her hand, stands neglected amid the laurels.  Such statues, though apparently works of art, grow naturally in Irish gardens.  Their germination is a mystery to the oldest inhabitants, to whose means and taste they are totally foreign.

There is a rustic bench, much roiled by the birds, and decorticated and split by the weather, near the little gate.  At the opposite side, a basket lies unmolested because it might as well be there as anywhere else.  An empty chair at the table was lately occupied by Cornelius, who has finished his breakfast and gone in to the room in which he receives rents and keeps his books and cash, known in the household as “the office.”  This chair, like the two occupied by Larry and Broadbent, has a mahogany frame and is upholstered in black horsehair.

Larry rises and goes off through the shrubbery with his newspaper.  Hodson comes in through the garden gate, disconsolate.  Broadbent, who sits facing the gate, augurs the worst from his expression.

Broadbent.  Have you been to the village?

Hodson.  No use, sir.  We’ll have to get everything from London by parcel post.

Broadbent.  I hope they made you comfortable last night.