"She shall not need armour."
"If you're a gentleman, Mr. Neville,--as I know you are,--you will not give her occasion to find out her own wakeness. Well, if it isn't past one I'm a sinner. It's Friday morning and I mus'n't ate a morsel myself, poor papist that I am; but I'll get you a bit of cold mate and a drop of grog in a moment if you'll take it." Neville, however, refused the hospitable offer.
"Father Marty," he said, speaking with a zeal which perhaps owed something of its warmth to the punch, "you shall find that I am a gentleman."
"I'm shure of it, my boy."
"If I can do no good to your friend, at any rate I will do no harm to her."
"That is spoken like a Christian, Mr. Neville,--which I take to be a higher name even than gentleman."
"There's my hand upon it," said Fred, enthusiastically. After that he went to bed.
On the following morning the priest was very jolly at breakfast, and in speaking of the ladies at Ardkill made no allusion whatever to the conversation of the previous evening. "Ah no," he said, when Neville proposed that they should walk up together to the cottage before he went down to his boat. "What's the good of an ould man like me going bothering? And, signs on, I'm going into Ennistimon to see Pat O'Leary about the milk he's sending to our Union. The thief of the world,--it's wathering it he is before he sends it. Nothing kills me, Mr. Neville, but when I hear of all them English vices being brought over to this poor suffering innocent counthry."
Neville had decided on the advice of Barney Morony, that he would on this morning go down southward along the coast to Drumdeirg rock, in the direction away from the Hag's Head and from Mrs. O'Hara's cottage; and he therefore postponed his expedition till after his visit. When Father Marty started to Ennistimon to look after that sinner O'Leary, Fred Neville, all alone, turned the other way to Ardkill.