would be to her compared with the satisfaction of her ambitions.  For, as his name denoted, he was engaged in politics—­an Irish-Canadian, a Free Trader, a Home Ruler, perhaps even a Chartist, for all Vassie said to the contrary.  The third Derby Ministry was in power, and Mr. Flynn was for the time agitating in the Opposition; but at least he was a member of Parliament, and what glory that was to Vassie.

Poor Vassie!  What, after all, was her ambition but to attain what should have come to her by right as daughter of the Squire of Cloom?  She had had to make it the end of her desires, for it she had had to appear what she was not—­what she ought to have been without any striving.  If Mr. Flynn were a man to whom Vassie’s beauty outweighed her defects, and if it were nothing but that with him, then was the outlook for her ultimate happiness poor; but she was her own mistress and had to be judge of that.  At least she had not deceived him, for there came a postscript to the rather worldly raptures.  “P.S.—­He knows about it all, and says it does not matter; what he wants is me.”

After Ishmael, the person most affected by the news, both in herself and her prospects, would be Phoebe.  Ishmael put the letter in his pocket, though he guessed she too would have had one, and went over to Vellan-Clowse, Wanda at his heels.

As he went the realisation of how this would affect him grew upon him; losing Vassie, his life at Cloom would not only be lonely, but, without her resolute insistence on the niceties, might all too easily slip into some such slough of boorishness as had overtaken it in his father’s day.  If Blanche had only been different, if she had been the Blanche he once thought her, how sweetly would the whole problem—­of loneliness and a standard of decency and of this tormenting thing that pricked at him—­have been solved.  Even the removal of his mother, though a relief, added to the sense of total disruption which weighed on him.  Cloom, the old Cloom that had been so jolly in spite of everything, the Cloom of the first three contested, arduous years, then the delightful Cloom glorified by that summer of Blanche and Killigrew and Vassie and little Judith, was dead, and everyone else had flown to other fields while he alone was left among the ruins.  Of all the old atmosphere Phoebe was the only one remaining—­little, soft, admiring Phoebe, whom he had hardly noticed all this past winter.

Ishmael was one of those to whom the ending even of a not altogether congenial atmosphere was fraught with sadness; had he been left to himself he would probably never have moved far out of an accustomed circle, thus much of the peasant was potent in his blood.  Now he felt, with the finality of youth, that everything had been stripped from around him, and that no new scheme of life formed itself before his eyes.

When he came to the top of the cliff above his plateau he turned off down the narrow goat-track that led to it, and when there flung himself on his face upon the turf, chin on hands, and brooded.  His thoughts took no definite shape; rather were they the vague unsettled desires for he knew not what.  Just that “something,” anything, would happen.