"Oh, but it did! Oh, devil a doubt about it!" The combined influence of memory and hot punch brought out Jack's musical brogue with unusual emphasis. "Only, there I couldn't carry out my foolish intentions. It wasn't the will that was wanting, my dear boy." "Providence looked after you on that occasion?" "Providence or--or the other thing. Oh, I could tell you a love-story, only you'd be laughing at me." "Indeed, I would not laugh!" "On my honour, I don't know why you shouldn't! I often enough have laughed at myself. She was the sweetest, gentlest, most delicate little creature!--Snowdrop I used to call her. And as for goodness, she was steeped in it. You felt goodness in the air wherever she was, just as you smell perfume all about when the hawthorns blossom in May. Ah! now to think of me talking in that way, and my head as smooth as a billiard-ball!" "And--and how was it? Did your people interfere to prevent the match?" "My people! Faith, they'd have screeched to be heard from here to there if I'd made her the Honourable Mrs. Jack Price, and contaminated the blood of the Prices of Mullingar. Did ye ever hear that my great-grandfather was a whisky distiller? Bedad, he was then! And I believe he manufactured good liquor, rest his soul! But I shouldn't have cared for that, as ye may believe. But they got hold of her, and told her that I was a roving, unsteady sort of fellow; and that was true enough. And--and she married somebody else. The man she took wasn't as good-looking as I was in those days. However, there's no accounting for these things, you know. It's fate, what? destiny! And she told me, in the pretty silver voice of hers, like a robin on a bough, that I had better forget her, and marry a lady in my own station, and live happy ever after. 'Mary,' said I, 'if I don't marry you I'll marry no woman, gentle or simple.' She didn't believe me. And I don't know that I quite believed myself. But so it turned out, you see, what? And so I was saved from a _mésalliance_, and from having, maybe, to bring up a numerous family on nothing a year; and the blood of the Prices of Mullingar is in a fine state of preservation, and Mary never became the Honourable Mrs. Jack Price. Honourable--bedad it's the Honourable Jack Price she'd have made of me if she'd taken me; an honourabler Jack than I've been without her, I'm afraid! D'ye know, Errington, I believe on my soul that, if I had married Mary, and gone off with her to Canada, and built a log-house, and looked after my pigs and my ploughs, I'd have been a happy man. But there it is, a man never knows what is really best for him until it's too late. We'll hope there are compensations to come, what? Of all the dreary, cut-throat, blue-devilish syllables in the English language, I believe those words 'too late' are the ugliest. They make a fellow feel as if he was being strangled. So mind your p's and q's, my boy, and don't throw away your chances whilst you've got 'em!"