with others?  But how should such going forth be managed?  And then,—­were there not dangers, terrible dangers,—­dangers specially terrible to one so friendless as her child?  Had not she herself been wrecked among the rocks, trusting herself to one who had been utterly unworthy,—­loving one who had been utterly unlovely?  Men so often are as ravenous wolves, merciless, rapacious, without hearts, full of greed, full of lust, looking on female beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her very life as a toy!  Were she higher in the world there might be safety.  Were she lower there might be safety.  But how could she send her girl forth into the world without sending her certainly among the wolves?  And yet that piteous question was always sounding in her ears.  “Mother, is it always to be like this?”

Then Lieutenant Neville had appeared upon the scene, dressed in a sailor’s jacket and trowsers, with a sailor’s cap upon his head, with a loose handkerchief round his neck and his hair blowing to the wind.  In the eyes of Kate O’Hara he was an Apollo.  In the eyes of any girl he must have seemed to be as good-looking a fellow as ever tied a sailor’s knot.  He had made acquaintance with Father Marty at Liscannor, and the priest had dined with him at Ennis.  There had been a return visit, and the priest, perhaps innocently, had taken him up on the cliffs.  There he had met the two ladies, and our hero had been introduced to Kate O’Hara.

CHAPTER VI.

I’ll go bail she likes it.

It might be that the young man was a ravenous wolf, but his manners were not wolfish.  Had Mrs. O’Hara been a princess, supreme in her own rights, young Neville could not have treated her or her daughter with more respect.  At first Kate had wondered at him, but had said but little.  She had listened to him, as he talked to her mother and the priest about the cliffs and the birds and the seals he had shot, and she had felt that it was this, something like this, that was needed to make life so sweet that as yet there need be no longing, no thought, for eternity.  It was not that all at once she loved him, but she felt that he was a thing to love.  His very appearance on the cliff, and the power of thinking of him when he was gone, for a while banished all tedium from her life.  “Why should you shoot the poor gulls?” That was the first question she asked him; and she asked it hardly in tenderness to the birds, but because with the unconscious cunning of her sex she understood that tenderness in a woman is a charm in the eyes of a man.

“Only because it is so difficult to get at them,” said Fred.  “I believe there is no other reason,—­except that one must shoot something.”

“But why must you?” asked Mrs. O’Hara.

“To justify one’s guns.  A man takes to shooting as a matter of course.  It’s a kind of institution.  There ain’t any tigers, and so we shoot birds.  And in this part of the world there ain’t any pheasants, and so we shoot sea-gulls.”