"Don't English people pay when they lose?" she asked after a long pause. Again he coloured. "Why, yes," he said hurriedly. "Yes, of course, only----" "Only what?" "Nothing--nothing. It was only that I thought you wanted----" "I wanted you not to encourage him. I never wanted you to think that he isn't a gentleman." She made the statement with perfect naturalness, as though the subject was one of common, everyday discussion. According to her code of honour, she was justified in putting every possible bar to her father's weakness; but where the bar had proved useless, where the weakness had conquered and the deed she disapproved of had been accomplished, then the matter, to her thinking, had passed out of her hands. Her judgment ceased to be individual and became the judgment of her race. As she looked at Milbanke's perplexed, concerned face, her expression changed, and she smiled. The smile was gracious and reassuring, but below the graciousness lay a tinge of tolerant indulgence. "We won't talk about it any more," she said. "I don't suppose you can be expected to understand." And suddenly raising her head, she whistled to the dogs. During the remainder of the walk Milbanke was very silent. Perplexed and yet fascinated by the problem, his mind dwelt unceasingly upon this strange position into which the chances of a day or two had thrown him. The bonds that drew him to his entertainers, and the gulf that separated him from them, were so tangible and yet so illusive. In every outward respect they were his fellow beings; they spoke the same language, wore the same dress, ate the same food, and yet unquestionably they were creatures of different fibre. He felt curiously daunted and curiously attracted by the peculiar fact. To appreciate the difference between the Englishman and the Irishman one must see the latter in his native atmosphere. It is there that his faults and his virtues take on their proper values; there that his innate poetry, his reckless generosity, his prodigal hospitality have fullest scope; there that his primitive narrowness of outlook, his antiquated sense of honour and his absurdly sensitive self-esteem are most vividly backgrounded. Outside his own country, he is merely a subject of a great Empire, possessing, perhaps, a sharper wit and a more ingratiating manner than his fellow-subjects of colder temperament; but in his natural environment he stands out pre-eminently as a peculiar development--the product of a warm-blooded, intelligent, imaginative race that by some oversight of Nature has been pushed aside in the march of the nations.