She saw his dilemma in his doubtful look.

’When I’ve done.  While you’re discussing matters with Father Boyle.  I—­know you’re burning to.  Sure it’s yourself knows as well as anybody, Captain Con, that I can walk a day long and take care of my steps.  I’ve walked the better half of Donegal alone, and this morning I’ll have a protector.’

Captain Con eyed the protector, approved of him, disapproved of himself, thought of Kathleen as a daughter of Erin—­a privileged and inviolate order of woman in the minds of his countrymen—­and wriggling internally over a remainder scruple said:  ’Mr. Colesworth mayhap has to write a bit in the morning.’

‘I’m unattached at present,’ the latter said.  ’I am neither a correspondent nor a reporter, and if I were, the event would be wanting.’

’That remark, sir, shows you to be eminently a stranger to the official duties,’ observed the captain.  ’Journalism is a maw, and the journalist has to cram it, and like anything else which perpetually distends for matter, it must be filled, for you can’t leave it gaping, so when nature and circumstance won’t combine to produce the stuff, we have recourse to the creative arts.  ‘Tis the necessity of the profession.’

‘The profession will not impose that necessity upon me,’ remarked the young practitioner.

’Outside the wheels of the machine, sir, we indulge our hallucination of immunity.  I’ve been one in the whirr of them, relating what I hadn’t quite heard, and capitulating what I didn’t think at all, in spite of the cry of my conscience—­a poor infant below the waters, casting up ejaculatory bubbles of protestation.  And if it is my reproach that I left it to the perils of drowning, it’s my pride that I continued to transmit air enough to carry on the struggle.  Not every journalist can say as much.  The Press is the voice of the mass, and our private opinion is detected as a discord by the mighty beast, and won’t be endured by him.’

‘It’s better not to think of him quite as a beast,’ said Mr. Colesworth.

’Infinitely better:  and I like your “guile,” sir:  But wait and tell me what you think of him after tossing him his meat for a certain number of years.  There’s Rockney.  Do you know Rockney?  He’s the biggest single gun they’ve got, and he’s mad for this country, but ask him about the public, you’ll hear the menagerie-keeper’s opinion of the brute that mauled his loins.’

‘Rockney,’ said Mr. Colesworth, ’has the tone of a man disappointed of the dictatorship.’

‘Then you do know Rockney!’ shouted Captain Con.  ’That’s the man in a neat bit of drawing.  He’s a grand piece of ordnance.  But wait for him too, and tell me by and by.  If it isn’t a woman, you’ll find, that primes him, ay, and points him, and what’s more, discharges him, I’m not Irish born.  Poor fellow!  I pity him.  He had a sweet Irish lady for his wife, and lost her last year, and has been raging astray politically ever since.  I