Bernard was not sure that he had got the twitching muscles of his face under control, but at least he could manage his tongue. “Oh, he came over here, did he?” he said, with a fair affectation of polite interest. “You spoke as if you knew him,” put in Kate, eagerly. “My father knew him as well--as well as he knew himself,” answered Bernard, with evasion, and then bit his lip in fear that he had said too much. CHAPTER XXII--THE INTELLIGENT YOUNG MAN. Within the next few days the people of Muirisc found themselves becoming familiar with the spectacle of two strange figures walking about among their narrow, twisted streets or across the open space of common between the castle and the quay. The sight of new-comers was still unusual enough in Muirisc to disturb the minds of the inhabitants--but since the mines had been opened in the district the old-time seclusion had never quite come back, and it was uneasily felt that in the lapse of years even a hotel might come to be necessary. One of these strangers, a rickety, spindling, weirdeyed man in spectacles, was known to be a cousin of Jerry Higgins, from America. The story went that he was a great scholar, peculiarly learned in ancient Irish matters. Muirisc took this for granted all the more readily because he seemed not to know anything else--and watched his shambling progress through the village streets by Jerry’s side with something of the affectionate pity which the Irish peasant finds always in his heart for the being he describes as a “nathural”. The other new-comer answered vastly better to Muirisc’s conceptions of what a man from America should be like. He was young, fresh-faced and elastic of step--with square shoulders, a lithe, vigorous frame and eyes which looked with frank and cheerful shrewdness at all men and things. He outdid even the most communicative of Muirisc’s old white-capped women in polite salutations to passers-by on the highway, and he was amiably untiring in his efforts to lure with pennies into friendly converse the wild little girls of Muirisc, who watched him with twinkling, squirrels’ eyes from under their shawls, and whisked off like so many coveys of partridges, at his near approach; the little boys, with the stronger sense of their sex, invariably took his pennies, but no more than their sisters could they be induced to talk.