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 off the Paddy would come down! That's a most unholy combination. But you remember, I hope, what I have also told you—that I am quite as Irish as you can ever be. I had an Irish grandmother—a beauty of beauties, a certain Lady Laura Fitzgibbon, qui vaut bien la vôtre. A charming old woman she was.'

'Oh, well, she wasn't of our kind!' the girl exclaimed, laughing.

'You mean that yours wasn't charming? In the presence of her granddaughter permit me to doubt it.'

'Well, I suppose that those hostilities of race—transmitted and hereditary, as it were—are the greatest of all.' Agatha Grice uttered this sage reflection by no means in the tone of successful controversy and with the faintest possible tremor in her voice.

'Good God! do you mean to say that an hostility of race, a legendary feud, is to prevent you and me from meeting again?' The Englishman stopped short as he made this inquiry, but Agatha continued to walk, as if that might help her to elude it. She had come out with a perfectly sincere determination to prevent Sir Rufus from saying what she believed he wanted to say, and if her voice had trembled just now it was because it began to come over her that her preventive measures would fail. The only tolerably efficacious one would be to turn straight round and go home. But there would be a rudeness in this course and even a want of dignity; and besides she did not wish to go home. She compromised by not answering her companion's question, and though she could not see him she was aware