pped at our doors. To hear wheels in the distance is nothing. As for
the cryin' in the shrubbery, that is another story. Some day I may tell
it to you, child."

"You have not told me yet," I said, "why you blame my godmother."

I had it in my mind that Lord and Lady St. Leger did not blame her, so
there could be nothing to blame. It was some stupid and ignorant
prejudice of old Maureen's. I knew she had fostered my Uncle Luke, and
that she loved him, as the foster-mother does, with an unreasoning and
jealous passion.

Her old lips met tightly.

"Ask Miss Mary herself about that, Miss Bawn," she said. "No one can say
that I am one to talk. After all those years, it would be a pity to
spoil all the tellin' for Miss Mary."

She sat smiling to herself, a bitter and mocking smile, when she had
finished the sentence. I knew Maureen better than to try to win talk
from her when she had once made up her mind to silence, so I let her be,
only changing the conversation to another subject.

"What will it be like, Maureen, when I am gone?" I asked.

"It will be lonely, Miss Bawn," she answered; and then, as I had
expected, she added, with a little sourness, "Not that you are a patch
on Master Luke and Miss Eleanor and your own mother for cheerfulness in
the house. Och, the days I could tell of when there was the fine
company-keepin', and the divarsion, and the carriages of the quality
drivin' up to the doors, and the music and the dancin'! Them were the
days that were worth havin', an' not these days when every one is
old--every one but yourself, Miss Bawn; and you're that quiet that I
wouldn't know you were in the house. Och, the good days! the good days!"

"They were good when Theobald was here," I said. "He made enough noise,
Maureen; didn't he? You used to scold then because he made so much."

"I always thought more of a boy than a girl," she answered. "You're
bonny enough, Miss Bawn, but you're not to be compared with Master
Theobald, let alone them I nursed at my breast--Master Luke and your
mother and your Aunt Eleanor."

"Mary Cashel thinks the world of me," I said, with enjoyment. Mary
Cashel is my foster-mother, and lives at the head of the Glen.

"She's a poor, foolish, talkative creature," Maureen said. "If her
Ladyship had listened to me she'd never have had Mary Cashel in the
house."

Just then the setting sun glinted on the windows of Brosna, the great
house that neighbours ours, which belongs to the Car