"'Pon my conscience," she says, "I wouldn't give a good farthing for the lot of you, to let that girl go by! She came into Rossmoyne on the top of a hay-cart, I hear,--more luck to her, say I; for it shows the pluck in her, and the want of the sneaking fear of what he and she will say (more especially _she_) that spoils half our women. When I was her age I'd have done it myself. Rossmoyne, get out of that, till I get another look at her. I like her face. It does me good. It is so full of life _et le beaute du diable_," says Madame O'Connor, who speaks French like a native, and, be it understood, Irish too. "_We_ like to look at her, too," says Owen Kelly. "To look, indeed! That would be thought poor comfort in my days when a pretty woman was in question, and men were men!" says Madam, with considerable spirit. "If I were a young fellow, now, 'tis in the twinkling of an eye I'd have her from under her aunt's nose and away in a coach and four." "The sole thing that prevents our _all_ eloping with Miss Beresford on the spot is--is--the difficulty of finding the coach and four and the blacksmith," says Mr. Kelly, with even a denser gloom upon his face than usual. Indeed, he now appears almost on the verge of tears. "We never lost time speculating on ways and means in _those_ days," says Madame O'Connor, throwing up her head. "Whoo! Times are changed indeed since my grandfather played old Harry with the countrymen and my grandmother's father by running away with her without a word to any one, after a big ball at my great grandmother's, and that, too, when she was guarded as if she was the princess royal herself and had every man in the South on his knees to her." "But how did he manage it?" says Desmond, laughing. "Faith, by making the old gentleman my great-grandfather as drunk as a fiddler, on drugged potheen," says Madam O'Connor, proudly. "The butler and he did it between them; but it was as near being murder as anything you like, because they put so much of the narcotic into the whiskey that the old man didn't come to himself for three days. That's the sort of thing for _me_," says Madam, with a little flourish of her shapely hand. "So it would be for me, too," says Kelly, mournfully. "But there's no one good enough to risk my neck for, now you have refused to have anything to do with me." "Get along with you, you wicked boy, making fun of an old woman!" says Madam, with her gay, musical laugh. "Though," with a touch of pride, "I won't deny but I led the lads a fine dance when I was the age of that pretty child yonder." "I wonder you aren't ashamed when you think of all the mischief you did," says Desmond, who delights in her. "Divil a bit!" says Madam O'Connor. "Still, I really think Ryde affects her," says Rossmoyne, who, being a dull man, has clung to the first topic promulgated. "That's nothing, so long as she doesn't affect him," says Kelly, somewhat sharply.