vely. I wished I might have taken
it to comfort me, for a sense of the hand it had held seemed to linger
about it. As I stood pressing it to my breast my eye fell on a picture
that stood on the writing-table--a picture that was like yet unlike
myself. It was a reproduction of the miniature I remembered.

There were other pictures and photographs about--men in uniform, women
of many ages, horses and dogs: one of Anthony Cardew himself, which made
my heart beat to look at it. I wished I might have taken it also, and
had the will to do it but I dared not. Besides, what right had I to such
things? Already I was trying to steel myself to destroy the one letter
he had written me. I should have no right to it when I was Richard
Dawson's wife.

A shout somewhere near at hand alarmed me. I slipped my letter under the
glove on the writing-table and fled out precipitately. Only in time, as
it proved, for Terence Murphy came round the house chasing a refractory
hen, which, as luck would have it, flew through the door I had left open
behind me.

"I could have sworn I shut that door," I heard Terence shout at the top
of his voice. "Bad luck to ye, ye divil"--to the hen--"God forgive me
for swearing. Will nothin' contint ye but the master's own room?"

While he dived within the room I got out through the little gate and
back into the avenue, where the briars and undergrowth had made hedges
behind which one could easily find cover.

Once in safety I stopped to gaze back at the long front of Brosna,
looking so sad. It is one of the white stuccoed houses so common in
Ireland in the eighteenth century, although much finer and more
magnificent than most. At the roof there was a balustrading, and below
were long lines of windows of a uniform oblong shape, each with an
architrave above it. The rains of our moist climate had wept upon it and
there were long green streaks extending down the walls. I saw now that
there was a sunken storey with a sort of area that ran all round the
house, so that Brosna, except for its thatched summer-room, was a house
of three storeys, not of two, as it appeared at first.

While I looked at it the evening shadows crept down upon it and seemed
to enfold it in a greater loneliness. But it was dearer to me than the
great houses of the neighbourhood which were comfortable and well kept
and inhabited. And I was glad to think of the ordered room, with its
grass plot before the window, and the fire set in the gr