direct
male issue it seemed likely that both title and inheritance (which, by
the conditions of an old Patent, might have descended to the nearest
living male through the female line) would go to a distant relative, a
boy, fourteen years of age, a Protestant, who was then at school at
Eton.

More than ever now my father chewed the cud of his great disappointment.
But it is the unexpected that oftenest happens, and one day in the
spring, Doctor Conrad, being called to see my mother, who was
indisposed, announced that she was about to bear a child.

My father's delight was almost delirious, though at first his happiness
was tempered by the fear that the child that was to be born to him might
not prove a boy. Even this danger disappeared from his mind after a
time, and before long his vanity and his unconquerable will had so
triumphed over his common sense that he began to speak of his unborn
child as a son, just as if the birth of a male child had been
prearranged. With my mother, with Doctor Conrad, and above all with
Father Dan, he sometimes went the length of discussing his son's name.
It was to be Hugh, because that had been the name of the heads of the
O'Neills through all the ages, as far back as the legendary days in
which, as it was believed, they had been the Kings of Ellan.

My mother was no less overjoyed. She had justified herself at last, and
if she was happy enough at the beginning in the tingling delight of the
woman who is about to know the sweetest of human joys, the joy of
bearing a child, she acquiesced at length in the accepted idea that her
child would be a boy. Perhaps she was moved to this merely by a desire
to submit to her husband's will, and to realise his hopes and
expectations. Or perhaps she had another reason, a secret reason, a
reason that came of her own weakness and timidity as a woman, namely,
that the man child to be born of her would be strong and brave and free.

All went well down to the end of autumn, and then alarming news came
from Castle Raa. The old lord had developed some further malady and was
believed to be sinking rapidly. Doctor Conrad was consulted and he gave
it as his opinion that the patient could not live beyond the year. This
threw my father into a fever of anxiety. Sending for his advocate, he
took counsel both with him and with Father Dan.

"Come now, let us get the hang of this business," he said; and when he
realised that (according to the terms of the ancien