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And in the midst the Morna put in at Westhaven, and while Ida was walking home from Mrs. Brandon's, she encountered Mr. Brady, looking extremely well turned-out in yachting costume and smoking a short pipe.

"Well," he continued, "I didn't read the case, and I am glad that I didn't, but I remember, of course, what was said about it at the time. But what does it matter what is said? I imagine the jury knew what they were about; they listened to the evidence for a week, I believe, which other people read in a few minutes. Of course they knew best! But how long have you known this, Morna?"

When he was six years of age his mother, beautiful, long-haired Muirne, came to see him. She came secretly, for she feared the sons of Morna, and she had paced through lonely places in many counties before she reached the hut in the wood, and the cot where he lay with his fists shut and sleep gripped in them. He awakened to be sure.

"Watch these and this and that," Fionn would have been told, "and always swim with a knife in your teeth." He lived there until his guardians found out where he was and came after him. Fiacuil gave him up to them, and he was brought home again to the woods of Slieve Bloom, but he had gathered great knowledge and new supplenesses. The sons of Morna left him alone for a long time.

"We will kill that one first," said Caevo'g. "There is only one of him," said Cuillen. "And each of us three is the match for an hundred," said Iaran. The uncanny, misbehaved, and outrageous harridans advanced then to meet the son of Morna, and when he saw these three Goll whipped the sword from his thigh, swung his buckler round, and got to them in ten great leaps.

But the Steels had been back two days, and Morna could not wait another hour. She was certainly consumed with curiosity; but that was not the only feeling which Mrs. Woodgate entertained towards the lady who was to be a nearer neighbor of her own sex and class than any she could count as yet. On the class question Morna had no misgivings; nevertheless, she was prepared for a surprise.

The sons of Morna came, but there were only two grim women living in a lonely hut to greet them. We may be sure they were well greeted.

Morna waxed all but indignant at the implication; she had a morbid horror of being considered a "blue-stocking," which she revealed with much girlish naïveté and unconscious simplicity of sentiment and praise. She was not so narrow as all that; she had had enough of learning; she had forgotten all that she had learnt; any dolt could be crammed to pass examinations.

She could not keep him with her for dread of the clann-Morna. The sons of Morna had been fighting and intriguing for a long time to oust her husband, Uail, from the captaincy of the Fianna of Ireland, and they had ousted him at last by killing him.

Morna thought that she might even go to church in the coat and skirt, now and again during the summer, and she had a brown straw hat with fine feathers of the lighter shade which she made peculiarly her own; but this she had discarded as too grand for an informal call, for Hugh had been summoned to a sick-bed at the last moment, and might be detained too late to follow.