A CONFIDENTIAL TALK Dick Kearney walked the bog from early morning till dark without firing a shot.

The snipe rose almost at his feet, and wheeling in circles through the air, dipped again into some dark crevice of the waste, unnoticed by him! One thought only possessed, and never left him, as he went.

He had overheard Nina's words to his sister, as he made his escape over the fence, and learned how she promised to 'spare him'; and that if not worried about him, or asked to pledge herself, she should be 'merciful,' and not entangle the boy in a hopeless passion.
He would have liked to have scoffed at the insolence of this speech, and treated it as a trait of overweening vanity; he would have gladly accepted her pity as a sort of challenge, and said, 'Be it so; let us see who will come safest out of this encounter,' and yet he felt in his heart he could not.
First of all, her beauty had really dazzled him, and the thousand graces of a manner of which he had known nothing captivated and almost bewildered him.

He could not reply to her in the same tone he used to any other.

If he fetched her a book or a chair, he gave it with a sort of deference that actually reacted on himself, and made him more gentle and more courteous, for the time.