‘It is the castle, dearest, he wants to see, not papa! You don’t know what manner of creature this is! He is one of your refined and supremely cultivated English--mad about archæology and mediæval trumpery. He’ll know all your ancestors intended by every insane piece of architecture, and every puzzling detail of this old house; and he’ll light up every corner of it with some gleam of bright tradition.’ ‘I thought these sort of people were bores, dear?’ said Kate, with a sly malice in her look. ‘Of course not. When they are well-bred and well-mannered---’ ‘And perhaps well-looking?’ chimed in Kate. ‘Yes, and so he is--a little of the _petit-maître_, perhaps. He’s much of that school which fiction-writers describe as having “finely-pencilled eyebrows, and chins of almost womanlike roundness”; but people in Rome always called him handsome, that is if he be my Cecil Walpole.’ ‘Well, then, will you tell YOUR Cecil Walpole, in such polite terms as you know how to coin, that there is really nothing of the very slightest pretension to interest in this old place; that we should be ashamed at having lent ourselves to the delusion that might have led him here; and lastly, that the owner is from home?’ ‘What! and is this the Irish hospitality I have heard so much of--the cordial welcome the stranger may reckon on as a certainty, and make all his plans with the full confidence of meeting?’ ‘There is such a thing as discretion, also, to be remembered, Nina,’ said Kate gravely. ‘And then there’s the room where the king slept, and the chair that--no, not Oliver Cromwell, but somebody else sat in at supper, and there’s the great patch painted on the floor where your ancestor knelt to be knighted.’ ‘He was created a viscount, not a knight!’ said Kate, blushing. ‘And there is a difference, I assure you.’ ‘So there is, dearest, and even my foreign ignorance should know that much, and you have the parchment that attests it--a most curious document, that Walpole would be delighted to see. I almost fancy him examining the curious old seal with his microscope, and hear him unfolding all sorts of details one never so much as suspected.’ ‘Papa might not like it,’ said Kate, bridling up. ‘Even were he at home, I am far from certain he would receive these gentlemen. It is little more than a year ago there came here a certain book-writing tourist, and presented himself without introduction. We received him hospitably, and he stayed part of a week here. He was fond of antiquarianism, but more eager still about the condition of the people--what kind of husbandry they practised, what wages they had, and what food. Papa took him over the whole estate, and answered all his questions freely and openly. And this man made a chapter of his book upon us, and headed it, “Rack-renting and riotous living,” distorting all he heard and sneering at all he saw.’