‘OLIVER GOGARTY.’

Two evenings were passed pleasantly on the composition and the copying of this letter, and, not daring to entrust it to the postboy, he took it himself to Bohola; and he measured the time carefully, so as to get there a few minutes before the postmistress sealed up the bag.  He delayed in the office till she sealed it, and returned home, following the letter in imagination to Dublin, across the Channel to Beechwood Hall.  The servant in charge would redirect it.  His thoughts were at ramble, and they followed the steamer down the Mediterranean.  It would lie in the post-office at Jerusalem or some frontier town, or maybe a dragoman attached to some Turkish caravansary would take charge of it, and it might reach Nora by caravan.  She might read it in the waste.  Or maybe it would have been better if he had written ‘Not to be forwarded’ on the envelope.  But the servant at Beechwood Hall would know what to do, and he returned home smiling, unable to believe in himself or in anything else, so extraordinary did it seem to him that he should be writing to Nora Glynn, who was going in search of the Christian river, while he was planning a journey westward.

A few days more, and the day of departure was almost at hand; but it seemed a very long time coming.  What he needed was a material occupation, and he spent hours in his garden watering and weeding, and at gaze in front of a bed of fiery-cross.  Was its scarlet not finer than Lady Hindlip?  Lady Hindlip, like fiery-cross, is scentless, and not so hardy.  No white carnation compares with Shiela; but her calyx often bursts, and he considered the claims of an old pink-flaked clove carnation, striped like a French brocade.  But it straggled a little in growth, and he decided that for hardiness he must give the verdict to Raby Castle.  True that everyone grows Raby Castle, but no carnation is so hardy or flowers so freely.  As he stood admiring her great trusses of bloom among the tea-roses, he remembered suddenly that it was his love of flowers that had brought him to Garranard, and if he hadn’t come to this parish, he wouldn’t have known her.  And if he hadn’t known her, he wouldn’t have been himself.  And which self did he think the worthier, his present or his dead self?

His brain would not cease thinking; his bodily life seemed to have dissipated, and he seemed to himself to be no more than a mind, and, glad to interest himself in the business of the parish, he listened with greater attention than he had ever listened before to the complaints that were brought to him—­to the man who had failed to give up a piece of land that he had promised to include in his daughter’s fortune, and to Patsy Murphy, who had come to tell him that his house had been broken into while he was away in Tinnick.  The old man had spent the winter in Tinnick with some relations, for the house that the Colonel had given him permission to build at the edge of the lake proved too cold for a winter residence.