Joyce like a small drowned cat, with her black hair clinging close to her head. It was a great achievement, and since Biddy could not, for the moment, produce any mythological terror in the nature of a Loreley better than a pike that preyed on swimmers, Gabrielle would often go down to the lake secretly in the middle of a summer morning, and strip off her clothes and float on her back in the sunshine. She must have looked a strange little thing with her long white legs, her smooth black hair, her deep violet eyes, and her red lips; for she had this amazing combination of features that you will sometimes find in the far West. She did not get them from her mother or from Jocelyn, both of whom were blond Saxons. I suppose they came to her through the blood of some Irishwoman whom a dead Hewish had married perhaps a hundred years before.

While Biddy Joyce instructed her in oaths and legend, and her father taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot and to fish, her moral and literal education were entrusted to Mr. Considine. Physically Mr. Considine was of a type that does not change much with the passage of time. When first he came to Roscarna, a couple of years before Gabrielle was born, he was a young man of twenty. How he came to be chosen for the cure of Clonderriff I do not know, unless he were in some way connected with the Parker family. He was a Wiltshireman, tall, sandy-haired, with a long face and a square jaw to which he gave an air of determination by constantly gritting his teeth. Gabrielle, as imitative as a starling, began to mimic this habit of his until one day he found himself staring at her, as at a mirror, and told her to stop. She had meant no harm; she didn't even know that she was doing it, but he treated the offence quite seriously.

It was his nature to treat everything seriously, including his mission among the heathen or, what was worse, the Catholic Joyces. He taught her the alphabet and the Lord's Prayer, and the collect for the week, and simple fractions and the capes and headlands of England (the capes and headlands of Ireland didn't matter) and the verb "to have" in French, together with long lists of the kings of Israel and Judah. Gabrielle was very quick to learn. From the first her memory was a pleasant surprise to her—sometimes a surprise to Mr. Considine, as when she offered to give him the Kings of Judah backwards, a proceeding that struck him as not only revolutionary but irreverent, and tinged with a flavour of the Black Mass.

Gabrielle always knew when she had annoyed or embarrassed him, not because he reproved her in any way—to have shown heat in words would have been against his principles—but because he did show heat in his neck, where a faint flush would spread upwards to his ears above the band of his clerical collar. When she was thoroughly bored Gabrielle would sometimes try this experiment, just in the same way as she made the snapdragons put out their tongues.

Jocelyn liked Considine and trusted him, partly, no doubt, because he happened to be an Englishman—the only one in this wilderness of Joyces—and partly because he was something of a sportsman: a little too serious and determined for his sport to appear natural, but for all that a good shot over dogs, and a very accurate, if not instinctive fisherman. In his boyhood, in Wiltshire, he had learned the technique of the dry fly, and his successes with trout in gin-clear water made Jocelyn respect him.

Considine's friendship with Jocelyn must be put to his credit. If he had been a prig he would either have turned up his nose at his patron's morals or condoned them with a sense of self-sacrifice and forbearance. He didn't do either. He just took Jocelyn for what he was worth, realising the shabby trick that heredity had played him; and his attitude toward Gabrielle was much the same. He knew that he couldn't and didn't want to keep pace with her enthusiasms any more than he could keep pace with the baronet's potations. He had been born on a bleak downland, and some of its characteristics had got into the thin, cold humour that was his blood. He was incapable of the generous passions of the people of Roscarna; but I think he was a good man, for all that. Even Mrs. Payne, who had reason to be irritated by his coldness, acknowledged this. And he was as conscientious in his education of Gabrielle as in the care of his parish.

The child matured very quickly. Physically I mean. That is the way in the west. Of course she was a great tom-boy, tall for her years, very frank in her speech and totally unconscious of her sex, as free and virginal as the young Artemis. The world of books to which Mr. Considine introduced her in her school-hours was wholly forgotten outside them. In the woods and on the mountains she throve as a magnificent young animal, moving with an ease and grace and freedom that civilised woman has lost. Her clothes were of Connemara homespun, but to a body such as hers, clothes did not matter. She went barefoot like the girls of Joyce's Country, and her ankles were as clean cut as the cannon of a thoroughbred. She wore her black hair in a thick plait that fell below her waist. She had no friends but Biddy, her father and Considine, except a few men, contemporaries of Jocelyn, who joked with her in the hunting field. She knew no women; for ladies did not call at Roscarna, and the county could never forgive her mother's origins in Baggott Street. All her life was uncomplicated and miraculously happy.

This Arcadian state of affairs might well have gone on for ever, if Jocelyn, feeling that he would like to give her a great treat and, perhaps, becoming proudly conscious of her beauty, had not determined, in the August of her sixteenth year, to take her to Dublin for the Horse Show week. She thrilled to the idea, not because she was anxious to meet her own species but because she loved horses. They travelled up by train from Galway through the vast monotonies of the Bog of Allen, and put up at Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, within five minutes' walk of her maternal grandmother's shop. In those days no Irish gentleman would have dreamed of dining in a public room, and they took their meals sedately in a private apartment.

Gabrielle had never set foot in a city before. The smooth pavements, the high buildings and the shop windows of Grafton Street excited her. Everything in Dublin wore an air magnificent and spacious. Even the ducks on the pond in the middle of Stephen's Green were exotic, and like no other ducks that she had known. But she could not enjoy her excitement to the full, for the feminine instinct in her realised from the first that her clothes were different from those of the people about her; and this disappointed her, for they were her best, made by the urbane fingers of Monoghan, the tailor at Oughterard.

When she walked down Grafton Street she fancied that people stared at her. It never struck her as possible that they were staring at her vivid and unusual beauty. It struck her as funny that her father did not seem to be aware of the discrepancy in her dress. He wasn't in the least. He had taken his daughter for granted. In his unconscious arrogance he imagined that the distinction of being a Hewish of Roscarna was sufficient in itself to make her independant of externals, and, as he proposed no alterations she trusted his judgment and they went to the Horse Show together in their ill-cut tweeds.

Gabrielle was entranced by the jumping. Whenever a horse topped the fences she straightened her back automatically as though she had been riding herself. With such splendid animals as those she felt that she could have made a better job of it. For the moment she forgot all about her questionable clothes; but when, later in the day, she was taken by her father to be presented to the Halbertons, the family of the Devonshire peer with whom the Hewishes were connected, she became