"I will tell you, Katie, how I have seen him," she said, "here with my mother, and among the poor cotters in the Truach Glas. How could I tell from that how he would behave to a girl? He was very pretty, with my mother. I liked him for it. He listened to her and did what she told him, and never put on an air, or looked wearied, as gentlemen will sometimes do. Then he was very kind to the cotters, as I have told you. To see them turned out made him wild with indignation. You may judge by that the kind of man he was. It was not like doing them a favour; it was mending a miserable wrong." "I have heard all this before," said Katie, with a slight impatience, "but what has that to do with it? You are telling me facts, when I want your opinion. The one has nothing to do with the other. I can put this and that together myself. But what I want is an opinion. What do you _think_? Don't put me off any longer, but tell me that," Katie cried. "What do you want my opinion about?" asked the other, with also, in her turn, some impatience in her voice. Then Katie ceased playing with her bangles, and looked up. She had never before met with such an unsatisfactory response from Oona. She said with a directness which denoted a natural and hereditary turn for the practical--"Whether he will come; and if he comes, what it will be for?" "He will certainly come," said Oona, "because he must. You that have lived on the loch so long--you know what the lords of Erradeen have to do." "And do you mean to say," cried Katie, with indignation, "that an old silly story will bring him--and not me? If that is your opinion, Oona! Do you know that he is a man like ourselves? Lord Innishouran thinks very well of him. He thinks there is something in him. For my part, I have never seen that he was clever; but I should think he had some sense. And how could a man who has any sense allow himself to be led into that?" She jumped up from her seat at Oona's feet in her indignation. "Perhaps you believe in the Warlock lord?" she said, with fine scorn. "Perhaps _he_ believes in him? If Lord Erradeen should speak of that to me, I would laugh in his face. With some people it might be excusable, but with a man who is of his century!--The last one was a fool--everybody says so: and had his head full of rubbish, when he was not going wrong. By the by!" Katie cried--then stopped, as if struck by a new thought which had not occurred to her before. "What is it?" said Oona, who had been listening with mingled resignation and impatience.