The information that the dog-cart had come for her was of the nature of a release. Barty put her into it. The May moon shone on his pale face as he looked up at Christian, and reverently took her hand in farewell. She had begun to find his dark and humble devotion oppressive; she liked him, which did not prevent her from thanking heaven when he released her hand from a pressure that had lasted longer than he knew. He stood on the gravel and watched the departing dog-cart vanish, like a ghostly thing, into the elusive mist of moonlight. The May moon, now sailing full overhead, looked with a broad satisfaction on the hardest hit of her victims. CHAPTER XIX At intervals in all histories there comes a pause, in which the moralities proper to the occasion are assembled, expounded and expanded. Such a moment might now seem to have arrived, its theme being the grain-of-mustard-seed-like character of the Cluhir picnic, as compared with the events that subsequently dwelt in its branches, nesting there, and raising up other events that flew far and wide, farther and wider than they can here be followed. But since moralities appeal only to the moral (to whom they are superfluous) it seems advisable to proceed at once to the primary result, which was the concert, that sprang like a Phoenix from the ashes of that fire on which the picnic kettle was boiled. The scheme had various appeals for its two chief promoters, young Mr. Coppinger and Sub. Lieut. Talbot-Lowry, R.N. Immanent in it was the necessity for frequent, almost for daily, visits to No. 6, The Mall, Cluhir. For the former of these gentlemen, whose acquaintance with the Mangan family was now of long, if of intermittent, familiarity, these visits afforded a less thrilling emotion than they held for the latter, who found himself honoured and welcomed in a degree to which he was quite unaccustomed at home. Larry was not quite sure that he approved of this blaze of social success for his young cousin. It is one thing to receive, languidly, the adulation of those in whom such adulation may be regarded as an indication of a widening horizon; but when an equal veneration is lavished upon the junior and disdained play-fellow of earlier years, the result is often a reconsideration of values. The May madness that rose like a mist from the bluebells in the woods of the Ownashee, and culminated in the magical light of the full moon, began to lift from the spirit of young Mr. Coppinger, leaving him, as he formulated it to himself (and found much satisfaction in the formula) bereft, bored, and benignant. He was quite prepared to retire gracefully in favour of Georgy, and was pleased with the thought that his interest in Tishy had been merely the outcome of a mood--_l'après-midi d'un faune_--so to speak. There was something artistic in these transient emotions, and his future, as at present determined, was to be devoted to art; certainly not to Tishy Mangan.