im in return an ideal passion, she did not, in
the very least, dislike him. She had always looked upon him as a good
friend. Before their marriage, ever since her earliest childhood they
had spent many happy hours together. As a tutor he had been able to
interest her, and apart from the fact that he was now her husband and
could offer her tenderness and admiration as well, there was no reason
why her life should be very different from what it had been. The only
thing that she loved of which he had deprived her was Roscarna. At
first, she had felt that more than anything; but when she recovered from
her illness and was able for the first time to accompany Considine on his
visits to the estate, it seemed to her that her passion for Roscarna had
faded. Perhaps also she was now a little frightened by its associations,
and felt that it would be safer for her to cut herself entirely free from
everything that reminded her of the old era. When she visited the house
to see her father she would look wistfully, almost fearfully, at her old
haunts; the path to the lake, the woods that she never entered now, and,
above them, the cloudy vastness of Slieveannilaun. She used to go there
once a week, and Considine, as a matter of course, went with her.

By the beginning of the spring her reason for these visits ceased.
Jocelyn, who had been ailing for a year or more, suddenly died.

I suppose it was the kind of death that he might have expected. It was
now two years since he had been able to take the keen physical delight in
country life that had been his chief apology for his early excesses.
Even before the blow of Radway's accident and Gabrielle's marriage had
fallen upon him his arteries had been ageing, and though he was barely
sixty years of age a man is as old as his arteries. The end came swiftly
with a left-sided cerebral haemorrhage that robbed him of his speech and
paralysed the right side of his body, not in the middle of any unusual
exertion, but when he was sitting quietly over the fire after dinner.
Biddy found him there when she brought him in his nightcap, huddled up on
the floor where he had fallen. She had expected something of the kind
for long enough. No one in the world knew Jocelyn as well as she did.

She guessed that nothing could be done, and waited for the morning before
she sent for Considine or the doctor. In the afternoon when Gabrielle
and Considine visited him Jocelyn was almost good-humoured,