and Pinckney’s departure, Mr. Hennessey had proved to her that Rafferty was a rogue who deserved no quarter; the man had been dismissed, the whole business was done with and over, and now, looking back in cool blood, she was utterly unable to reconstruct and put together the reasons for the outburst of anger that had 71 severed her from the one kinsman who had put out his hand to help her.

71

She could no longer conjure up the feeling that Pinckney was an interloper come to break up Kilgobbin and spoil the home she had known from childhood.

Fate had done that. Kilgobbin was gone—let to strangers; Hennessey had taken over her guardianship pro tem, and it was entirely owing to herself that she was in her present position. She had no right to criticise the friends of the Hennesseys; she had deliberately walked into that circle from which she felt she never could escape now.

Just as Pinckney had discovered that guardianship was showing him traits in his character hitherto unknown to him, Phyl was discovering her woman’s instinct as regards social matters.

She recognised that once having taken her place amongst the Hennessey set, her position for life was fixed, as far as Ireland was concerned. She was branded.

The Berknowles were an old family, but she was the last of them. The relatives living in the south could be no help to her; they were poor, rabid Catholics and had fallen to little account, owing to unwise marriages and that irresponsible fatuous apathy in affairs which is the dry rot of Ireland and the Irish people. They were proud as Lucifer, but no one was proud of them.

If only Philip Berknowles had been a man to make fast friends amongst his own class, some of those friends might have come to his daughter’s rescue 72 now. But Berknowles had lived his own life since the death of his wife, an easy-going country gentleman in a county mostly inhabited by squireens and cottage folk, caring little for the convenances and with no taste for women’s society.

72

Thoughts born of all these facts, some of which were only half understood, filled the mind of the girl as she lay awake with the noise of that raucous party ringing in her ears; and when she fell asleep, it was only to awake with a sense of despondency weighing upon her and the odious Farrel incident waiting to follow her through the day.

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