“Why, no,” he said.  “My mother looks at me as though I had the skin of a young child—­and there is another——­ Miss Bawn, I wish you happiness.  I am very glad the better man has won.”

“You are very generous.”

While we talked Mrs. Dawson got up and left us.  She was one of those people who are always forgetting things and going in search of them, so the action had no special significance.

“You are very generous,” I said.  And then I asked him the question which was in my mind.  “Mr. Dawson,” I said, “can you tell me where Nora is?  I want to write to her, to bring her back.”

“I know,” he answered, “but she will not come back yet awhile.  She has, by her own wish and desire, gone to school, to a convent.  She had schooling enough for me, God knows, in her tender and faithful heart; but she is as obstinate as any creature ever was when she thinks a thing is right.  So I have to wait, very much against my will, while the nuns make a lady of Nora.  It is her own phrase.  I have assured her that she is a better lady than most ladies I have known, and that I am not a gentleman.  But she would banish me and try my patience.”

“Meaning——?”

“Meaning—­that she will marry me when she has acquired the thing she desires.  Meaning—­I would have married her, Bawn, without love, because they blackened her, the innocent soul, for her mercy to me.  But I have learned to love her.  She holds my heart against all women.  I am not hideous to her.”

“And your mother?”

“Is enchanted.  We are going to sell Damerstown and live in England.  It will give us all a better chance.  Good-bye, Miss Bawn, for we shall not meet again.”

It made a nine days’ wonder when the people heard that Richard Dawson had married Nora Brady; but that was a year later, and Damerstown was shut up and to be let.

Lord and Lady St. Leger still rule at the Abbey, and seem likely to rule for many years, to the joy of their children.

Theobald’s wife is keen about her husband’s profession, and will not let him leave the army yet, so that we see them only at intervals.

But the old couple are not lonely.  My godmother and Uncle Luke have their full measure of happiness.  They have, what my dear godmother confessed to me she had not dared to hope for—­a child, a boy—­brave and beautiful, worthy to succeed his father in time as the Lord St. Leger.  There is no bonnier boy in all the countryside except my own, and he is the image of his father, so it is not likely that any child could be just like him.  But the young heir fills Aghadoe Abbey with joy and peace.  My grandmother told me the other day that the ghosts have not been heard since the child came to banish them.

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Transcriber’s Notes: 

Punctuation normalized.

Page 225, “that” changed to “than” (rather than endure)