Major Talbot-Lowry looked down at his cousin with the condescending
amusement that he felt to be the meed of female godliness especially
when allied with temperance principles.

"Well, claret might do for once in a way," he conceded, shaking his
long legs to take the creases out of his trousers, "and you mightn't
find Father Sweeny so anxious to repeat the dose--and that mightn't be
any harm either! I daresay you wouldn't object to that, Frederica!
Well, good-bye, ladies! I'm going down to the kennels--"

Lady Isabel's and Miss Coppinger's eyes followed him, as he swung,
with that light halt in his leisurely stride, down the long
drawing-room, trolling in the high baritone, that someone had pleased
him by likening to a cavalry trumpet,

"Oh, Father McCann was a beautiful man,
But a bit of a rogue, a bit of a rogue!
He was full six feet high, he'd a cast in his eye,
And an illigant brogue, an illigant brogue!"

In both his wife's and his cousin's faces was the same look, the look
that often comes into women's faces when, unperceived, they regard the
sovereign creature. Future generations may not know that look, but in
the faces of these women, born in the earlier half of the nineteenth
century, there was something of awe, and of indulgence, of
apprehension, and of pity. Dick was so powerful, so blundering, so
childlike. Miss Frederica expressed something of their common thought
when she said:

"Dick seems to forget that he is Larry's guardian as well as I. Also