Having indulged in a soothing torrent of tears, Doreen departed with lightened heart with the other young people for an excursion on the bay. She felt all the better for the passage of arms, for her breezy common-sense told her that my lady's charges resulted from momentary pique, and had no foundation in conviction. But, resulting from the quarrel, a vista had risen in her mind for the first time of what she might be sacrificing for her people's sake. Evil tongues will wag. Women who brave public opinion have always gone to the wall, time out of mind. No. Not always. Scandal had nothing to say against the maid of Domrémy; Judith's fair fame was smirched in nowise by that little supper _en tête-à-tête_ with Holofernes. Miss Wolfe failed to consider that the rapid action of that Jewish tragedy, with its pitiless termination in the murder of a helpless sleeper, did much to keep the tongue of scandal quiet. Had she held clandestine interviews with the doughty general, walked with him by moonlight and so forth, it is highly probable that all the geese in Jewry would have cackled, and that the heroine would have been tabooed for a brazen slut. Now the young lady whose peculiar position interests us so much at present, while perfectly innocent of wrong-doing, could not but see that her motives might possibly be misinterpreted; that spiteful remarks, similar to her aunt's, would probably go the round of Dublin. Was she prepared to endure opprobrium? was the game worth the candle she was burning for it? was the good she was likely to achieve at all in proportion to the social ruin which would fall upon herself? Like the generous young person that she was, her first romantic feeling was an exultant glow at the distant prospect of martyrdom; her second--due to the practical firmness of her character--a doubt whether she might not be self-deceived by inexperience. Then her father too--the good weak father who cared very much for sublunary fleshpots--what would he say when he came to know how deeply circumstances were involving his child in matters which he would surely disapprove? She could not help the stirring of an idea (which she strove hard to lull to rest) to the effect that it is not very heroic to drag innocent people into a mess; and a second one moved at the stirring of the first, which whispered that if her own name were to be publicly bandied, her father would certainly get into trouble for not keeping her in check. Her aunt's was the wisdom of the world; there was no doubt about it.