I took up the glove and kissed it furtively.  I wished I might have taken it to comfort me, for a sense of the hand it had held seemed to linger about it.  As I stood pressing it to my breast my eye fell on a picture that stood on the writing-table—­a picture that was like yet unlike myself.  It was a reproduction of the miniature I remembered.

There were other pictures and photographs about—­men in uniform, women of many ages, horses and dogs:  one of Anthony Cardew himself, which made my heart beat to look at it.  I wished I might have taken it also, and had the will to do it but I dared not.  Besides, what right had I to such things?  Already I was trying to steel myself to destroy the one letter he had written me.  I should have no right to it when I was Richard Dawson’s wife.

A shout somewhere near at hand alarmed me.  I slipped my letter under the glove on the writing-table and fled out precipitately.  Only in time, as it proved, for Terence Murphy came round the house chasing a refractory hen, which, as luck would have it, flew through the door I had left open behind me.

“I could have sworn I shut that door,” I heard Terence shout at the top of his voice.  “Bad luck to ye, ye divil”—­to the hen—­“God forgive me for swearing.  Will nothin’ contint ye but the master’s own room?”

While he dived within the room I got out through the little gate and back into the avenue, where the briars and undergrowth had made hedges behind which one could easily find cover.

Once in safety I stopped to gaze back at the long front of Brosna, looking so sad.  It is one of the white stuccoed houses so common in Ireland in the eighteenth century, although much finer and more magnificent than most.  At the roof there was a balustrading, and below were long lines of windows of a uniform oblong shape, each with an architrave above it.  The rains of our moist climate had wept upon it and there were long green streaks extending down the walls.  I saw now that there was a sunken storey with a sort of area that ran all round the house, so that Brosna, except for its thatched summer-room, was a house of three storeys, not of two, as it appeared at first.

While I looked at it the evening shadows crept down upon it and seemed to enfold it in a greater loneliness.  But it was dearer to me than the great houses of the neighbourhood which were comfortable and well kept and inhabited.  And I was glad to think of the ordered room, with its grass plot before the window, and the fire set in the grate, ready to be lit when the master should come home.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

When I reached home I found that my grandmother had been looking for me, and Neil Doherty told me the reason.  Word had come from Castle Clody that Miss Champion’s cousin was dead.

“You must go to her, Bawn,” said my grandmother, sadly.  “We must not leave her alone, and she will not want me.  You will spend the night with her?”