Then she turns and waves him a second and last good night. Returning the salute, he replaces his hat on his head, and thrusting his hands deep in his pockets, turns towards Coole--and dinner. He is somewhat late for the latter, but this troubles him little, so set is his mind upon the girl who has just left him. Surely she is hard to win, and therefore--_how_ desirable! "The women of Ireland," says an ancient chronicler, "are the coyest, the most coquettish, yet withal the coldest and virtuousest women upon earth." Yet, allowing all this, given time and opportunity, they may be safely wooed. What Mr. Desmond complains of bitterly, in his homeward musings to-night, is the fact that to him neither time nor opportunity is afforded. "She is a woman therefore to be won;" but how is his courtship to be sped, if thorns are to beset his path on every side, and if persistent malice blocks his way to the feet of her whom he adores? He reaches home in an unenviable frame of mind, and is thoroughly unsociable to Owen Kelly and the old squire all the evening. Next morning sees him in the same mood; and, indeed, it is about this time he takes to imagining his little love as being a hapless prisoner in the hands of two cruel ogres (I am afraid he really does apply the term "ogres" to the two old ladies of Moyne), and finds a special melancholy pleasure in depicting her as a lonely captive condemned to solitary confinement and dieted upon bread and water. To regard the Misses Blake in the light either of ogres or witches required some talent; but Mr. Desmond, at this period of his love-affair, managed it. He would go about, too, singing,-- "Oh, who will o'er the downs so free," taking immense comfort out of, and repeating over and over again, such lines as-- "I sought her bower at break of day, 'Twas guarded safe and sure;" "Her father he has locked the door, Her mother keeps the key; But neither bolt nor bar shall keep My own true love from me,"-- until bars, and bolts, and locks, and keys seemed all real. CHAPTER XVIII. How, after much discussion, the devoted, if mistaken, adherents of Thalia gain the day--and how, for once in his life, Owen Kelly feels melancholy that is not assumed. "I wish you would all attend," says Olga Bohun, just a little impatiently, looking round upon the assembled group, with brows uplifted and the point of a pencil thrust between her rose-red lips.