There were, indeed, many new graves, and many, too, whose living or dying yet hung in the balance; and if I had been a happy woman I would have felt it ominous to be married at such a time.  But as it was, nothing mattered.

“You are sure Nora Brady has not taken the sickness, Neil?” I asked.

“No, Miss Bawn; she’s safe so far.  To be sure, she might be inkybatin’ it”—­Neil, like all our people, loves a long word—­“and she’ll have to put up a month’s quarentine when the last o’ the sickness is over.  I hear she’s been everywhere it was.”

After breakfast I escaped to the summer-house in the shrubbery with my letter.  The first snow lay on the ground and was white on the dark, shining leaves of the laurels and laurestinus, but my hands trembled and burned as I opened the letter.  Why did he write to me now when I had become used to my misery?  As the sheet rustled in my hands I felt such a longing and a desire for him that if he called me across the world I must go.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE WEDDING-DRESS

“My dear,” the letter began, “I have your letter.  Most happily my rascal, Terence, forwarded it; most happily, and by the grace of God, as I think, I thought to leave him the name of a halting-place where I might pick up letters, yet I expected none.  What a dullard I was, Bawn, not to have known!  I compared my years and sorrows and my white hairs with your youth and beauty, and I thought you must love that golden lad, your cousin.  Heart’s delight, it will take all the years that are left to me to tell you my gratitude.  There will be no sacrifice, child, and I do certainly believe there is no secret that Lord and Lady St. Leger need fear.  I should come to you on the wings of the wind if there was not a reason that I must stay a little while, and if it were not that some one is hurrying to Aghadoe whom I can trust to tear the web of lies to pieces.  He will come in time, and I shall not long delay to follow.  And you are mine and I am yours for ever and ever.

“Your devoted
“Anthony Cardew.”

The letter at once delighted and bewildered me.  For a while I gave myself up to the delight, kissing it and crying over it like a mad creature.  Then I came back to the cold light of facts.  Just four days now to elapse before my wedding-day.  What could happen in those four days to save me?  Anthony’s messenger, nay, Anthony himself, could do nothing.  There was always my grandfather’s face of suspense, by which I knew he counted the hours, always my grandmother’s piteous air of asking for forgiveness.  Not even Anthony Cardew could absolve me from what they bound me to.

I tried to be sorry for having written him that letter.  Nothing, indeed, had been farther from my thoughts than that it should be forwarded to him.  He wrote from Assumption, an island in the South Seas.  If he was by my side he could hardly save me, unless he could prove that Uncle Luke was innocent of the things Garret Dawson attributed to him and could prove it to the world.  And how could he do that?