“He sleeps quietly, Bawn,” she said.  “He has not slept well of late.”

“None of us has slept well,” I said.

“It has almost broken our hearts, child, to be so cruel to you.  I don’t believe we have had a happy hour since it was settled.  We have lain awake till cock-crow, night after night.”

I had it in my mind to ask her if she had heard the ghosts, but she had never liked the talk about the ghosts, and, remembering that, I was silent.

“We ought to have faced it out,” she went on.  “As I said to Lord St. Leger, if the disgrace was there, there was no doing away with it, even though only Garret Dawson knew it.  Mary always said she would not believe dishonour and deliberate misdoing on Luke’s part.  I ought to have had her faith.”

“It is not too late,” I said.  “Let Garret Dawson publish his news!  We shall see what he has to tell.”

“But there is no disproving it, for Luke is dead and gone.”

“On your own reasoning, dearest Gran,” I said.  “If we will not believe in Uncle Luke’s disgrace then there is no disgrace for us.  We shall only take it that Garret Dawson bears false witness.  Who would believe Garret Dawson against Luke L’Estrange?”

“Ah, but you have lost your lover, my poor Bawn,” she said tenderly.  “You have lost Theobald, and this old house will pass away from you and him.  It is all mortgaged and there is Luke’s debt.”

“Let it go,” I said, wincing.  “But as for Theobald, never fret about that, Gran.  We were only brother and sister, too close to become closer.”

“I think the wedding has turned Maureen’s head,” my grandmother went on fretfully.  “I found her setting Luke’s room in order.  She would have it that he was coming home from school by the hooker from Galway.  She has made his bed and put his room in order and she asked me at what hour she should light his fire.”

“She is always madder at the full moon,” I said.

“To-morrow morning we will send for Mary.  She will help us to bear it.  When I think of her faith I wonder that I should have had so little.”

“I believe you are happier,” I said wonderingly.

“I feel as though I had passed out of the hands of men into the hands of God,” she replied, caressing my hair with her disengaged hand, for I had left my chair to sit down on the hearthrug by her.

Again I had that strange, acute sense of listening; but there was a storm outside, and the wind cried in the chimney and rattled the windows, and a branch of a tree tapped against the shutters—­that was all.

“While your grandfather lives you will not be homeless,” she said:  “and who knows but that Theobald may be able to clear off the mortgages?”

My grandfather slept peacefully, as though he needed sleep; and now we talked and now we were silent, and the night wore on.

We could not move for fear of disturbing him.  Dido came and lay on the rug beside me, and slept with her chin resting on my foot.  I think my grandmother dozed a little and the fire went low for I was afraid to stir to replenish it.  The old dog moaned and whimpered in her sleep, and my grandmother came out of her doze to say that she had been dreaming of Luke; and nodded off again.