Alack! he was in no mood to play the lover, being prosaically engrossed with a throbbing brow and swollen tongue. Shane, although he had 'made his head,' and could drink claret against most people, was apt to feel faded of a morning, and to retaliate for physical ills upon the first person who came within his reach. Last night he had presided over the Blasters, had shattered a decanter on the pate of a gentleman who presumed to breathe hard in his presence, and who, of course, had challenged him to fight. So far so good; but the stranger had shown himself so ill-bred as absolutely to decline to draw his sword till certain business matters could be arranged, and so the meeting was perforce postponed for a few hours--a most rude and inconsiderate proceeding! For might not the champion Blaster, the admirable Hellfire, the Prince of Cherokees, have other work upon his hands before dinner-time? And besides, though money-debts may wait for months without a smirching of the niceties of honour, it is a bad example for the multitude to allow duels to accumulate. Moreover, Shane had promised, as it happened, to promenade with the Gillins, in the Beaux Walk, on this particular afternoon. Even an Irish earl cannot, like Roche's bird, be in two places at a time; and so the youthful fire-eater fretted and fumed, cross with himself and everybody else, heedless of his cousin's bonnet, and longed to force a quarrel upon some one. Terence was seated a few yards off, on the steps of the young men's wing, which led to his own apartment, giving some directions to his private henchman with regard to the manufacture of flies. Now and then he threw a displeased glance at his pretty cousin, marvelling for whose behoof she had made herself so bewitching, and then, gnawed by carking jealousy, turned to vent his spleen upon his servant.