Young Robert enthusiastically seconded his brother's motion, for his instinctive dread of bloodshed impelled him to postpone the decisive moment; and he was possessed, besides, with a strong belief in Terence, whom he had known intimately during his sojourn at the Priory. Russell and the others obstinately combated the point, urged thereto by youthful jealousy and wounded self-esteem. True, none of the council were of mature years; but to be lectured and prated at by this boy Robert, who was yet a student in Alma Mater, was an indignity which it behoved them to resent. Doreen, who, after her noteworthy row upon the bay, threw aside the appearance of apathy she had assumed, saw this new danger with concern. Torn well-nigh to death already by factions of many kinds, was Erin to sit by and see her last forlorn hope, her last bodyguard of champions, scattered by the same curse? Miss Wolfe became seized by a frenzy for galloping across country. Her horses were constantly brought back to the stable with their coats turned, their flanks heaving, their skins reeking with foam. 'No doubt the girl was crazed,' my lady averred, as constantly as she marked the grooming of the animals from her bedroom window-seat. 'Why could she not ride like a well-brought-up young person in the green alleys of the Ph[oe]nix, or amble on the mall of Stephen's Green?' My lady did not know that Doreen met separately, at certain cottages, the different members of the Directory; that she prayed and exhorted each one, as though he were alone to blame, to wisdom and a sacrifice of paltry vanity; and that she came away from each interview with such a dread of impending failure--a distrust of these budding generalissimos--that it required the most reckless gallops, with a dangerous fence or two _en route_, to calm her nerves sufficiently to meet my lady's scrutiny with the accustomed mask of composure on her face. At the Abbey she had little to complain of now, for all were too busy to take much heed of her. Shane, with a prospect of departing northward, which rumours of accumulating outrages seemed to make more and more urgent, shilly-shallied and delayed, and selected guns and fishing-rods, and invited little knots of Cherokees, and spent more and more time at the Little House, as though the effort to tear himself away from Dublin delights and beloved Norah were too much for his resolution. Under the circumstances he was not likely to trouble his cousin with attentions; and Doreen breathed freely again so far as her private affairs were concerned, for she perceived that this project of her aunt's was fading into a vision which never would and never could be realised. Any one who watched might see that Shane was desperately smitten with Norah, and Doreen was in no wise jealous. Norah was a nice girl, Doreen determined, who was worthy to become a countess, and she would help to make her happy as much as she could.