Lucy, on recognizing his voice, could scarcely prevent her emotion from becoming perceptible; but owing to the darkness of the night, and the folds of her thick veil, her fellow-travellers observed nothing. “Why,” replied the grazier, who had evidently, from a lapse of memory, substituted one species of manufacture for another thing, “they tell me he is stopping in the head inn in Ballytrain; an', dang my buttons, but he must be a fellow of mettle, for sure didn't he kick that tyrannical ould scoundrel, the Black Baronet, down-stairs, and out of the hall-door, when he came to bullyrag over him about his daughter--the darlin'?” Lucy's distress was here incredible; and had not her self-command and firmness of character been indeed unusual, she would have felt it extremely difficult to keep her agitation within due bounds. “You labor under a mistake there,” replied the stranger; “I happen to know that nothing of the kind occurred. Some warm words passed between them, but no blows. A young person named Fenton, whom I know, was present.” “Why,” observed the grazier, “that's the young fellow that goes mad betimes, an' a quare chap he is, by all accounts. They say he went mad for love.” From this it was evident that rumor had, as usual, assigned several causes for Fenton's insanity. “Yes, I believe so,” replied the stranger. Alley, who thought she had been overlooked in this partial dialogue, determined to sustain her part in the conversation with a dignity becoming her situation, now resolved to flourish in with something like effect. “They know nothing about it,” she said, “that calls Miss Gourlay's sweetheart a button-maker. Miss Gourlay's not the stuff to fall in love wid any button-maker, even if he made buttons of goold; an' sure they say that the king an' queen, and the whole royal family wears golden buttons.” “I think, in spaiking of buttons,” observed the grazier, with a grin, “that you might lave the queen out.” “And why should I lave the queen out?” asked Alley, indignantly, and with a towering resolution to defend the privileges of her sex. “Why ought I lave the queen out, I say?” “Why,” replied the grazier, with a still broader grin, “barring she wears the breeches, I don't know what occasion she could have for buttons.” “That only shows your ignorance,” said Alley; “don't you know that all ladies wear habit-shirts, and that habit-shirts must have buttons?” “I never heard of a shirt havin' buttons anywhere but at the neck,” replied the grazier, who drew the inference in question from his own, which were made upon a very simple and primitive fashion. “But you don't know either,” responded Alley, launching nobly into the purest fiction, from an impression that the character of her mistress required it for her defence, “you don't know that nobody is allowed to make buttons for the queen but a knight o' the garther.” “Garther!” exclaimed the grazier, with astonishment. “Why what the dickens has garthers to do wid buttons?”