‘Dear! and I’m wet to the skin,’ she confided the fact to herself vocally.

‘You would not be advised,’ a gentleman beside her said after a delicate pause to let her impulsive naturalism of utterance fly by unwounded.

’And aren’t you the same and worse?  And not liking it either, I fear, Sir!’ she replied, for despite a manful smile his complexion was tell-tale.  ’But there ’s no harm in salt.  But you should have gone down to the cabin with Father Boyle and you would have been sure of not catching cold.  But, Oh! the beautiful . . . look at it!  And it’s my first view of England.  Well, then, I’ll say it’s a beautiful country.’

Her companion looked up at the lighted sky, and down at the pools in tarpaulin at his feet.  He repressed a disposition to shudder, and with the anticipated ecstasy of soon jumping out of wet clothes into dry, he said:  ‘I should like to be on the top of that hill now.’

The young lady’s eyes flew to the top.

’They say he looks on Ireland; I love him; and his name is Caer Gybi; and it was one of our Saints gave him the name, I ’ve read in books.  I’ll be there before noon.’

‘You want to have a last gaze over to Erin?’

‘No, it’s to walk and feel the breeze.  But I do, though.’

‘Won’t you require a little rest?’

‘Sure and I’ve had it sitting here all night!’ said she.

He laughed:  the reason for the variation of exercise was conclusive.

Father Boyle came climbing up the ladder, uncertain of his legs; he rolled and snatched and tottered on his way to them, and accepted the gentleman’s help of an arm, saying:  ’Thank ye, thank ye, and good morning, Mr. Colesworth.  And my poor child! what sort of a night has it been above, Kathleen?’

He said it rather twinkling, and she retorted: 

‘What sort of a night has it been below, Father Boyle?’ Her twinkle was livelier than his, compassionate in archness.

’Purgatory past is good for contemplation, my dear.  ’Tis past, and there’s the comfort!  You did well to be out of that herring-barrel, Mr. Colesworth.  I hadn’t the courage, or I would have burst from it to take a ducking with felicity.  I haven’t thrown up my soul; that’s the most I can say.  I thought myself nigh on it once or twice.  And an amazing kind steward it was, or I’d have counted the man for some one else.  Surely ‘tis a glorious morning?’

Mr. Colesworth responded heartily in praise of the morning.  He was beginning to fancy that he felt the warmth of spring sunshine on his back.  He flung up his head and sniffed the air, and was very like a horse fretful for the canter; so like as to give Miss Kathleen an idea of the comparison.  She could have rallied him; her laughing eyes showed the readiness, but she forbore, she drank the scene.  Her face, with the threaded locks about forehead and cheeks, and the dark, the blue, the rosy red of her lips, her eyes, her hair, was just such a south-western sky as April drove above her, the same in colour and quickness; and much of her spirit was the same, enough to stand for a resemblance.  But who describes the spirit?  No one at the gates of the field of youth.  When Time goes reaping he will gather us a sheaf, out of which the picture springs.