She had got very fat of late, which didn't improve matters. But Paddy seemed to see nothing amiss; he strode forward to take his sister's hands, beaming. What a dear fellow he was, thought Father Ralph as he watched the little scene, half amused, half detached.

"Well, Mary! How fine you look! Like a young girl!" In truth she looked almost exactly like that famous photograph of Queen Victoria taken not long before she died. The two heavy lines were there on either side of the masterful nose, the mulish mouth was set indomitably, the slightly protruding and glacial eyes fixed without blinking on Meggie. Father Ralph's own beautiful eyes passed from niece to aunt, and back to niece again.

Mary Carson smiled at Paddy, and put her hand on his arm. "You may take me in to dinner, Padraic. Father de Bricassart will escort Fiona, and the boys must make do with Meghann between them." Over her shoulder she looked back at Meggie. "Do you dance tonight, Meghann?"

"She's too young, Mary, she's not yet seventeen," said Paddy quickly, remembering another parental shortcoming; none of his children had been taught to dance.

"What a pity," said Mary Carson.

It was a splendid, sumptuous, brilliant, glorious party; at least, they were the adjectives most bandied about. Royal O'Mara was there from Inishmurray, two hundred miles away; he came the farthest with his wife, sons and lone daughter, though not by much. Gilly people thought little of traveling two hundred miles to a cricket match, let alone a party. Duncan Gordon, from Each-Uisge; no one had ever persuaded him to explain why he had called his station so far from the ocean the Scots Gaelic for a sea horse. Martin King, his wife, his son Anthony and Mrs. Anthony; he was Gilly's senior squatter, since Mary Carson could not be so called, being a woman. Evan Pugh, from Braich y Pwll, which the district pronounced Brakeypull.